Roads are being built at an unprecedented rate across the globe. Some 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles) of paved roads are expected to be built in just the four decades leading up to 2050 — enough to wrap around the equator more than 600 times. But much of this construction is happening under the radar. Networks of unmapped, unregulated and often illegal roads are insidiously spreading into fragile ecosystems. If left unchecked, they threaten to wreak a devastating toll on tropical forests, according to new research. The new study, published April 10 in Nature, documents 1.37 million km (851,000 mi) of roads sprawling across the islands of New Guinea, Borneo and Sumatra, three hotspots of biodiversity in Southeast Asia and the Pacific that contain the largest combined expanse of tropical rainforest in the world outside the Amazon and the Congo Basin. This total length of roads is between three and 6.6 times more than recorded in officially recognized databases. The researchers say the discrepancy indicates the presence of a glut of what they term “ghost roads”: informally or illicitly constructed roads carved by loggers, miners, land grabbers or speculators. Typically falling outside of the purview of environmental governance, ghost roads create blind spots in zoning and law enforcement, ultimately posing one of the gravest conservation threats facing the world’s forests. “Roads are often a death-knell for ecosystems, especially ghost roads, which are often illegal and unregulated,” William Laurance, study co-author and a distinguished research professor at James Cook University…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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