In an article published in Nature, my colleagues and I show that illicit, often out-of-control road building is imperiling forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The roads we're studying do not appear on legitimate maps. We call them "ghost roads." What's so bad about a road? A road means access. Once roads are bulldozed into rainforests, illegal loggers, miners, poachers and landgrabbers arrive. Once they get access, they can destroy forests, harm native ecosystems and even drive out or kill indigenous peoples. This looting of the natural world robs cash-strapped nations of valuable natural resources. Indonesia, for instance, loses around A$1.5 billion each year solely to timber theft. All nations have some unmapped or unofficial roads, but the situation is especially bad in biodiversity-rich developing nations, where roads are proliferating at the fastest pace in human history. Mapping ghost roads For this study, my Ph.D. student Jayden Engert and I worked with Australian and Indonesian colleagues to recruit and train more than 200 volunteers. This workforce then spent some 7,000 hours hand-mapping roads, using fine-scale satellite images from Google Earth. Our team of volunteers mapped roads across more than 1.4 million square kilometers of the Asia-Pacific region. As the results rolled in, we realized we had found something remarkable. For starters, unmapped ghost roads seemed to be nearly everywhere. In fact, when comparing our findings to two leading road databases, OpenStreetMap and the Global Roads Inventory Project, we found ghost roads in these regions to be 3 to 6.6 times longer than all mapped roads put together. When ghost roads appear, local deforestation soars—usually immediately after the roads are built. We found the density of roads was by far the most important predictor of forest loss, outstripping 38 other variables. No matter how one assesses them, roads are forest... |