![]() ![]() ![]() In Siberia, road expansion is promoting a sharp increase in logging and forest fires. In forested areas of western North America, one of the best predictors of wildfire frequency is the density of roads. Of course, roads are not just an environmental worry in the tropics. India, for instance, is currently constructing and upgrading roads to tighten its hold on Arunachal Pradesh state, over which it and China formerly fought a war. And geopolitically, new roads can be used to help secure resource-rich frontier regions. Local communities in remote areas often demand new roads to improve access to markets and medical services. Governments view roads as a cost-effective means to promote economic development and access natural No other region can match the tropics for the sheer scale and pace of road expansion. “Roads,” said the eminent ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, “are the seeds of tropical forest destruction.”ĭespite their environmental costs, the economic incentives to drive roads into tropical wilderness are strong. These are but a small sample of the vast number of new tropical roads, which inevitably open up previously intact tropical forests to a host of extractive and economic activities. And in the Congo basin, a recent satellite study found a burgeoning network of more than 50,000 kilometers of new logging roads. Three major new highways are cutting across the towering Andes mountains, providing a direct link for timber and agricultural exports from the Amazon to resource-hungry Pacific Rim nations, such as China. Brazil is currently building 7,500 kilometers of new paved highways that crisscross the Amazon basin. This surge in road building is being driven not only by national plans for infrastructure expansion, but by industrial timber, oil, gas, and mineral projects in the tropics.įew areas are unaffected. We live in an era of unprecedented road and highway expansion - an era in which many of the world’s last tropical wildernesses, from the Amazon to Borneo to the Congo Basin, have been penetrated by roads. ![]()
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