Build a road and destroy a forest - that’s the finding of researchers who say newly discovered ghost roads pose an unprecedented threat to the world’s dwindling rainforests.
But they also found that artificial intelligence (AI) could help map the secret roads - and so head off some of the worst risks that humans pose.
For where the roads come, people follow and, soon enough, mass destruction begins. Trees are felled in their millions, plus people, birds and wildlife flee, as loggers and poachers move into an environment already teetering on the edge.
“Road development is often the first fatal step in forest destruction,” Daniel Carillo, a campaign director of San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, said.
The extent of the once-secret road network only came to light after researchers spent 7,000 hours scouring millions of hi-res satellite photos to find a maze of unmapped ghost roads winding through Southeast Asia and Melanesia.
Their one hope is that AI might in future help track the extent of deforestation much more quickly, making it easier to shut down illegal operations with speed.
“There’s no question AI could be a critical arrow in the quiver of forest conservationists to help map roads and slow forest destruction,” said William Laurance, a professor at James Cook University in Queensland, said.
“Developing nations can’t halt illegal roads, logging, mining and poaching if they don’t know where they’re occurring.”
Laurance’s team - whose findings were published in Nature magazine in April - said the secret network posed one of the gravest direct threats to the world’s tropical forests, already at risk from logging, mining, agriculture and climate change.
“We call them ‘ghosts roads’ because they’re hidden from view and because, as ecologists, the out-of-control forest destruction they often instigate scares the hell out of us,” said Laurance.
While planned roads aid trade and help vital resources flow, their unregulated cousins “unleash a Pandora’s box of environmental ills and societal challenges”, the researchers said in Nature magazine
The 210 study volunteers and researchers checked images of 1.42 million plots of land to better map the forests of Indonesia, Malaysia and New Guinea.
In this tiny part of the world, they discovered nearly a million km of uncharted roads not shown on OpenStreetMap, and 1.16 million km more than can be seen on the Global Roads Inventory Project. The ghost roads they found were enough to wrap around the earth 23 to 29 times.
The researchers said deforestation usually peaks soon after the roads are built, a pattern common to three of the world’s largest continental islands: Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea.
“When roads get punched into a forest, they fragment the landscape, disrupting important ecosystems and wildlife habitat,” said Carillo.
“They suddenly provide access to poachers, loggers, or others looking to exploit that previously inaccessible and intact forest, often disastrously.”
The lure of the road is the money to be made.
About 40 per cent of the roads in Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea cut through palm oil, wood-pulp and rubber tree plantations. The rest run through agricultural lands and intact forests.
Destroying tropical forests also has an outsize effect on climate change as they make up 68 per cent of the world’s carbon stock, a Nature article published in 2019 shows.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
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