Road building, land use and climate change: prospects for environmental governance in the Amazon

Abstract

Some coupled land-climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road building, which facilitates human access to natural resources that beget forest fragmentation. While official government road projects have received considerable attention, unofficial road building by interest groups is expanding more rapidly, especially where official roads are being paved, yielding highly fragmented forest mosaics. Effective governance of natural resources in the Amazon requires a combination of state oversight and community participation in a 'hybrid' model of governance. The MAP Initiative in the southwestern Amazon provides an example of an innovative hybrid approach to environmental governance. It embodies a polycentric structure that includes government agencies, NGOs, universities and communities in a planning process that links scientific data to public deliberations in order to mitigate the effects of new infrastructure and climate change.

Impacts of roads and linear clearings on tropical forests

“…Roads that penetrate into remote frontier regions often lead to forest encroachment and destruction (Table 1) and we recommend that these be avoided wherever possible. Paved highways are particularly damaging because they tend to spawn networks of secondary roads that can increase the spatial scale of their impact [75,76]; for example, the 2000-km-long BelemBrasilia Highway, completed during the early 1970s, has now evolved into a 400-km-wide swath of forest destruction and secondary roads across the eastern Brazilian Amazon [66]. Efforts to project the long-term condition of Amazonian forests using an array of biophysical predictors suggest that the locations of highways and roads will be the greatest single factor influencing future spatial patterns of forest loss, fragmentation and degradation [15,74,77].…”

Large scale spatio-temporal patterns of road development in the Amazon rainforest

“…This is not surprising, and similar neighbourhood effects are seen with other anthropogenic phenomena at large spatial scales, for example economic development (Sachs & Warner 1997) and land-use land-cover change (Verburg et al 2004). The development of roads away from the arc-of-deforestation, towards the centre of the Amazon reflects the economic activities of the area, where initial roads grant access to extractive industry and colonizers, who expand the network with unofficial roads to increase access and transport products (Fearnside 2008;Perz et al 2008). Over time, as more timber and agricultural land resources are exhausted, roads are built to access forest further from the arc-of-deforestation.…”

Fighting for the forest: The roadless warrior

“…The project's remote location has made it difficult to assess what might have happened had roads been allowed into Camisea, but historically, deforestation has followed closely on the heels of road building 1 . A lack of roads has kept the western Amazon relatively intact.…”