Impacts of roads in

the Tropics
Felipe Moreli Fantacini

Workshop in Conservation Biology

9th to 11th of September 2018
• Introduction
• Since 2000 – length of roads has increased by 12 million km worldwide and further 25
millions km of paved roads are expected by 2050
• 90% of all new infrastructure projects are occurring in developing nations = The Tropics

• Effectively located and constructed

roads provides social integration and
economic growth

• Poorly planned or executed roads

creates numerous environmental
economic and socio-political problems.

• Fully appreciation of the relative risk and rewards of roads is urgently needed in the
tropics, where road are determining the pace and pattern of environmental changes.
• Why impacts are particularly acute in Tropical forest?

• High biodiversity
• Complex architecture and uniquely humid dark stable microclimate – several species
specializes for forest-interior
• Tropical species are susceptible to hunting, road kill, elevate predation and species
invasion near roads
• Environmental Impacts and Risks

• Direct effects
• Exotic species invasion
• Edge effects – dryer and hotter than in forest interior
• Source of chemical pollutants: heavy metal, ozone and
organic molecules
• Soil erosion and sediment inputs in water courses
• Soil erosion 15X times higher in road sides compared
to non-road areas in a dry region in Porto Rico
• 4-13X More landslides near roads than in agriculture
or forest areas in Mountains in Porto Rico

Jaeger et al. 2014

WET TROPICAL FOREST
• Heavy pulses of sediments into streams and
rivers = elevate turbidity and temperature,
reduce O2 and eutrophication
• Not enough culverts, bridges and drainage
structures
• Indirect effects
• Human accessibility in forest regions- Increasing
human migrations
• Fires, land speculation, illegal mining and
poaching, logging and forest cleaning
• In Brazil 95% of forest cleaning occurs within
5km of a paved road
• In Brazil for each 1km of legal road there are
3km of illegal or unofficial roads
• In Malaysia 90% of poaching occurs within 5.5 of
paved and unpaved roads.
• Avoiding the first cut is the most urgently needed means to limit the scale and pace of
environmental degradation in the tropics and the most cost effective of all conservation
strategies.

Ibisch et al. 2016

• Challenges for building and Maintaining Tropical Roads
• Roads are expensive to construct in steep, dissected or
swampy terrains
• Few roads in the tropics are adequately constructed to
withstand the effects of heavy rainfall
• Too much funding is being devoted to road-expansion
schemes but little to maintain and repair roads.
• Road projects are also highly vulnerable to poor
governance – In Africa 15-20% of the total bid prices of
world bank funded roads was lost with corruption

• Financial risk of road construction

• Cost-benefits analyses for road investment often fail to include key factors such as log term
environmental and social impacts.
• Key concern is that major financial institutions such as Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and
Brazilian Development Bank could increase the risk of unwise investments.
• Private investors are strongly profit-oriented.
• Socio-political risk of road construction
• Vehicle crashes
• Invasion corridor: human and animal pathogens vectors.
Increasing dengue fever, malaria and HIV in India, Brazil and
Congo
• Roads penetrating in remote areas are often perceived as a
driver of increased aggression, lawlessness, black market, etc

• Environmental Impact Assessments

• Identify and minimize the risks and potential liabilities of infrastructure projects through mitigation
and offset measures.
• However EIAs normally are not robust or adequate in scope and can suffer from a range of
structural problems> - narrow special scale, lack assessment of indirect and induced effects,
conflicts of interest (normally the project proponent funds the EIA)
• EIA and Strategic Environmental Assessment and socio-cost-benefits analysis are needed with more
broadly-based strategic approaches to infrastructure and land-use planning.
• Considerations

• Rigorous and Independent EIAs are critical.

• rigorous national and international policies need to be put in place that make
infrastructure development aid conditional upon prior analyses of real long-
term costs of these projects.
• Importance of Roadless areas
• Evidence-based information for mitigations
Thank you for your attention!