“Loggers, miners and other road builders are putting roads almost everywhere, including places they simply shouldn’t go, such as wilderness areas,” said Professor Andrew Balmford of the University of Cambridge. “Some of these roads are causing environmental disasters.”
“The current situation is largely chaos,” said Professor William Laurance of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. “Roads are going almost everywhere and often open a Pandora’s Box of environmental problems.”
“Just look at the Amazon rainforest,” said Laurance. “Over 95 percent of all forest destruction and wildfires occur within 10 kilometers of roads, and there’s now 100,000 kilometers of roads crisscrossing the Amazon.”
But the researchers say it doesn’t have to be like this. “Roads are like real estate,” said Laurance. “It’s ‘location, location, location’. In the right places, roads can actually help protect nature.”
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Image: Forest clearing along roads in the southern Brazilian Amazon (in Rondônia)
Credit: Google Earth
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Roads could help rather than harm the environment
22 March 2013
Two leading ecologists say a rapid proliferation of roads across the planet is causing irreparable damage to nature, but properly planned roads could actually help the environment.