Rerouting a major Indonesian mining road to spare nature and reduce development costs

Abstract

Road-infrastructure projects are expanding rapidly worldwide while penetrating into previously undisturbed forests. In Sumatra, Indonesia, a planned 88-km-long mining road for transporting coal would imperil the Harapan Forest, the island's largest surviving tract of lowland rainforest. Such roads often lead to increased forest encroachment and illegal logging, fires, poaching, and mining. To evaluate the potential impact of the proposed road, we first manually mapped all existing roads inside and around the Harapan Forest using remote-sensing imagery. We then calculated the expected increase in forest loss from three proposed mining-road routes using a metric based on travel-time mapping. Finally, we used least-costpath analyses to identify new routes for the road that would minimize forest disruption and road-construction costs. We found that road density inside and nearby the Harapan Forest is already 3-4 times higher than official data sources indicate. Based on our analyses, each of the three proposed mining-road routes would lead to 3,000-4,300 ha of additional forest loss from human encroachment plus another 424 ha lost from road construction itself. We propose new routes for the mining road that would result in up to 3,321 ha less forest loss with markedly lower construction costs than any other planned route. We recommend approaches such as ours, using least-cost-path analysis, to minimize the environmental and financial costs of major development projects.

Global importance of Indigenous Peoples, their lands, and knowledge systems for saving the world’s primates from extinction

“…Given the accumulated loss and fragmentation of natural habitat, biodiversity, and Indigenous sovereignty caused by an expanding human footprint across the global primate range ( 14 , 190 ), immediate government actions and legislation are needed to mitigate these outside pressures on Indigenous Peoples’ lands and end land dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. Unfortunately, in primate range nations like Brazil, national legislation strengthening the ability of ranchers and business owners to assert legal claims over public lands, including Indigenous Peoples’ lands, while limiting the ability of Indigenous Peoples to delay or halt development, including infrastructure projects, mining concessions, and the expansion of industrial agriculture on their lands, is now law ( 70 ).…”

“…Dispossession also results in the loss of symbolic connections with nature and ancestors (Fig. 7) (32,185,(188)(189)(190)(191). This has occurred regardless of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which recognizes that (i) "Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories, and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired" (192), (ii) "Indigenous Peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories, and resources that they possess because of traditional ownership or other traditional occupation or use, as well as those which they have otherwise acquired" [( 185), article 26-2], and (iii) "States shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories, and resources.…”

Mapping Remote Roads Using Artificial Intelligence and Satellite Imagery

“…Many roads in such regions, both legal and illegal, are unmapped [10,11]. Hence, road-mapping studies in the Brazilian Amazon [10,[12][13][14][15], Asia-Pacific [11,16,17], and elsewhere [18,19] regularly find 2-13 times more road length than reported in government sources or online road databases. The abundance of such clandestine roadways underscores the degree to which environmental governance and conservation advocacy are challenged by the lack of complete, up-to-date information on road development [20].…”