Rerouting a major Indonesian mining road to spare nature and reduce
development costsJayden E. Engert, Françoise Yoko Ishida & William F.
LauranceConservation Science and PracticeSeptember 2, 2021 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-cost-path 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.
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LINKhttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1M7YhvJ8vLcE5zOHwKJJSyqOWvALAqXuv/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M7YhvJ8vLcE5zOHwKJJSyqOWvALAqXuv/view?usp=sharingFULL
PAPER WEB LINKhttps://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/csp2.521
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/csp2.521