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Timber stockpiled along a logging road. Day Edryshov/Shutterstock

If you asked a friend to name the worst human threat to nature, what would they say? Global warming? Overhunting? Habitat fragmentation?

A new study suggests it is in fact road-building.

“Road-building” might sound innocuous, like “house maintenance” – or even positive, conjuring images of promoting economic growth. Many of us have been trained to think so.

But an unprecedented spate of road building is happening now, with around 25 million kilometres of new paved roads expected by 2050. And that’s causing many environmental researchers to perceive roads about as positively as a butterfly might see a spider web that’s just fatally trapped it.

A Malayan tapir killed along a road in Peninsular Malaysia. WWF-Malaysia/Lau Ching Fong Shattered

The new study, led by Pierre Ibisch at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, Germany, ambitiously attempted to map all of the roads and remaining ecosystems across Earth’s entire land surface.

Its headline conclusion is that roads have already sliced and diced Earth’s ecosystems into some 600,000 pieces. More than half of these are less than 1 square kilometre in size. Only 7% of the fragments are more than 100 square km.

Remaining roadless areas across the Earth. P. Ibisch et al. Science (2016)

That’s not good news. Roads often open a Pandora’s box of ills for wilderness areas, promoting illegal deforestation, fires, mining and hunting.

In the Brazilian Amazon, for instance, our existing research shows that 95% of all forest destruction occurs within 5.5km of roads. The razing of the Amazon and other tropical forests produces more greenhouse gases than all motorised vehicles on Earth.

Animals are being imperilled too, by vehicle roadkill, habitat loss and hunting. In just the past decade, poachers invading the Congo Basin along the expanding network of logging roads have snared or gunned down two-thirds of all forest elephants for their valuable ivory tusks.

Deforestation along roads in the Brazilian Amazon. Google Earth Worse than it looks

As alarming as the study by Ibisch and colleagues sounds, it still probably underestimates the problem, because it is likely that the researchers missed half or more of all the roads on the planet.

That might sound incompetent on their part, but in fact keeping track of roads is a nightmarishly difficult task. Particularly in developing nations, illegal roads can appear overnight, and many countries lack the capacity to govern, much less map, their unruly frontier regions.

One might think that satellites and computers can keep track of roads, and that’s partly right. Most roads can be detected from space, if it’s not too cloudy, but it turns out that the maddening variety of road types, habitats, topographies, sun angles and linear features such as canals can fool even the smartest computers, none of which can map roads consistently.

The only solution is to use human eyes to map roads. That’s what Ibisch and his colleagues relied upon – a global crowdsourcing platform known as OpenStreetMap, which uses thousands of volunteers to map Earth’s roads.

Therein lies the problem. As the authors acknowledge, human mappers have worked far more prolifically in some areas than others. For instance, wealthier nations like Switzerland and Australia have quite accurate road maps. But in Indonesia, Peru or Cameroon, great swathes of land have been poorly studied.

A quick look at OpenStreetmap also shows that cities are far better mapped than hinterlands. For instance, in the Brazilian Amazon, my colleagues and I recently found 3km of illegal, unmapped roads for every 1km of legal, mapped road.

A logging truck blazes along a road in Malaysian Borneo. Rhett Butler/Mongabay

What this implies is that the environmental toll of roads in developing nations – which sustain most of the planet’s critical tropical and subtropical forests – is considerably worse than estimated by the new study.

This is reflected in statistics like this: Earth’s wilderness areas have shrunk by a tenth in just the past two decades, as my colleagues and I reported earlier this year. Lush forests such as the Amazon, Congo Basin and Borneo are shrinking the fastest.

Road rage

The modern road tsunami is both necessary and scary. On one hand, nobody disputes that developing nations in particular need more and better roads. That’s the chief reason that around 90% of all new roads are being built in developing countries.

On the other hand, much of this ongoing road development is poorly planned or chaotic, leading to severe environmental damage.

For instance, the more than 53,000km of “development corridors” being planned or constructed in Africa to access minerals and open up remote lands for farming will have enormous environmental costs, our research suggests.

Orangutans in the wilds of northern Sumatra. Suprayudi

This year, both the Ibisch study and our research have underscored how muddled the UN Sustainable Development Goals are with respect to vanishing wilderness areas across the planet.

For instance, the loss of roadless wilderness conflicts deeply with goals to combat harmful climate change and biodiversity loss, but could improve our capacity to feed people. These are tough trade-offs.

One way we’ve tried to promote a win-win approach is via a global road-mapping strategy that attempts to tell us where we should and shouldn’t build roads. The idea is to promote roads where we can most improve food production, while restricting them in places that cause environmental calamities.

Part of a global road-mapping strategy. Green areas have high environmental values where roads should be avoided. Red areas are where roads could improve agricultural production. And black areas are ‘conflict zones’ where both environmental values and potential road benefits are high. W. F. Laurance et al. Nature (2014)

The bottom line is that if we’re smart and plan carefully, we can still increase food production and human equity across much of the world.

But if we don’t quickly change our careless road-building ways, we could end up opening up the world’s last wild places like a flayed fish – and that would be a catastrophe for nature and people too.

Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. He is the director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University, and founder and director of ALERT--the Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers.

Patrick Barkham is rightly worried about the impacts of urbanisation on our wildlife (Notebook, 13 December). London is home to more than 13,000 species of fauna, flora and fungi, but we are expected to accommodate a population increase equivalent to the size of Leeds by 2050, and building density can only go so far before our needs override those of others we share our city with. While flowering buddleia, dashing parakeets and curious foxes demonstrate adaptability to this brave new world, there are many more species that simply can’t cope – with higher density we’ll lose precious diversity. The London assembly is currently looking at how new housing can do more to conserve wildlife, and we’re encouraged by Mayor Khan’s talk of “good growth” as he sets out his early plans for the capital. We need real commitment to making room for nature and, importantly, room for London to breathe.
Mathew Frith
Director of conservation, London Wildlife Trust

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There’s good news and bad, it’s a bit of an ethical pick and mix

This is a glorious time of year for confectionary lovers, and in a few days time I’ll embark on my annual mission to hoover up boxed chocolates with customary enthusiasm.
My mission includes house visits, so although I would favour Fairtrade artisanal chocolate brands with top notch ethical sourcing, I can’t always choose.

The good news is that there is evidence the big chocolate brands are wising up with regard to their supply chain. Ethical labels are now widely used on Christmas chocolates in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden.

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Actor and environmental activist tells UN awards ceremony that truth about climate change has spread like ‘wildfire’ despite prominent science deniers

Tackling climate change is the “biggest economic opportunity” in the history of the US no matter who holds political office, the Hollywood star and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio said on Friday.

Related: Leonardo DiCaprio meets Trump as climate sceptic nominated

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Dispute over major tourist attraction and conservation area is tearing local communities apart

“There’s, like, 50 people on the way up, so take your photos,” said a young American man, shirtless, his face daubed with paint, as he came striding through the forest towards the look-out. The view was spectacular: lush tropical foliage clinging to the sheer rock-face of a canyon plunging several 100 feet to a series of stunning turquoisey pools where tourists could be spotted swimming.

This was Semuc Champey, a must-visit on the Central American backpacker circuit and increasingly one of Guatemala’s most well-known tourist destinations. “Hidden”, “unique” and “natural paradise” are all thrown around to describe it. Lonely Planet calls Semuc “arguably the loveliest spot in the country”, while CNN dubbed the River Cahabón, which flows under the pools, the world’s “third best river for travellers” after the Amazon and Zambezi.

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Relive a bit of the 2016 #ASBNexperience!
Another ASBN season has come to a close and what a year it has been! We started the year off with a branding launch and through the year hosted a slew of great conversations and presentations across a variety of topics. We truly hope you, our community, have gotten great benefit from this years events and have enjoyed the knowledge you might have gained and connections made.

Cast: AdelaideSBN

关闭全球合法象牙交易市场对拯救大象具有重要意义，但要彻底根除偷猎大象和非法象牙消费，我们必须对非法象牙贸易宣战。 (翻译：金艳/chinadialogue)

• Why the Guardian is publishing its elephant reporting in Chinese
  

目前看来，一个不可避免的趋势是几乎所有合法象牙交易市场最终都将关闭。这是一个由多家动物权利及福利组织共同提出的大象保护首选方案，其目的就是阻止大象偷猎行为。这些组织认为，象牙合法贸易会为非法交易提供掩护，并刺激象牙需求。

支持该计划的人认为，废除合法贸易，需求就会下降。禁止一切象牙销售有两大益处，一是方便执法，二是可以避免消费者买到非法产品。现在，认同这一观点的人越来越多。今年9月，世界自然保护联盟通过一项提议，建议全球所有国家关闭自己的国内象牙市场。几星期后的10月，《濒危野生动植物物种国际贸易公约》第17届缔约方会议召开，会上也通过了类似的提案。

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Red Shoot wood, New Forest A pony will strain every muscle in its neck to reach the most tender branch-end leaves

As we press on along the ridge above the wood, on the north side of the path we find ponies raising the browse line as they stretch high into the hollies. A large white one strains every muscle in its neck to get at the most tender branch-end leaves. Forest ponies eat a huge quantity of holly during the cold weather. People often cut branches to make life easier for them, but this group don’t need any help.

On the other side, we spot one of the woodland’s giants that has come to grief. Possibly dating from the origins of Red Shoot Wood in the 17th and 18th centuries, this huge oak has been caught by some vortex-wind, and lifted enough to break the myriad of cable-like roots anchoring it into the shallow clay that coats the underlying gravels.

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An app that turns a smartphone into an earthquake detector helps citizens monitor tremors.

The UK fishing industry will need continued access to EU markets after Brexit, a House of Lords report warns.

There's a problem. The seeds won't germinate and the plant is endangered. Could the answer lie in a heady mix of gauze gift bags, heat torture, forced smoke inhalation and emu digestive juices? This is a repeat episode from the Off Track archives.

Ministers claim soaring number is a success in effort to cut bovine TB in England but charities question cull’s effectiveness

The number of animals shot in England’s controversial badger cull soared to more than 10,000 this autumn, as part of the government’s attempt to cut tuberculosis (TB) in cattle.

Ministers claimed the result as a success but a leading scientist said there was “no basis” for suggesting the cull was effective, while wildlife charities said badgers were being used as a scapegoat for failures in the intensive livestock industry.

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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Feeding Bryde’s whales, fighting seals and a Harry Potter spider are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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Patrick Muhayirwa was trapped in an ambush while patrolling to protect gorillas in Africa’s oldest national park

• Another day, another dead wildlife ranger. We must do more to help them
  

A 26-year-old wildlife ranger has been gunned down by militia operating in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

According to park authorities, Patrick Prince Muhayirwa was part of a group of rangers and DRC army personnel patrolling the huge park to prevent poaching.

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Mexican authorities try to save the world's smallest porpoise by seizing illegal fishing nets.

Improved light, ventilation and heat control can boost workers’ productivity by thousands of dollars a year and reduce instances of sick building syndrome

People working in green buildings think better in the office and sleep better when they get home, a new study has revealed.

The research indicates that better ventilation, lighting and heat control improves workers’ performance and could boost their productivity by thousands of dollars a year. It also suggests that more subjective aspects, such as beautiful design, may make workers happier and more productive.

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Scientists stepped outside their comfort zones to protest the attacks they face from the incoming administration

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and for scientists, these are desperate measures.

Tuesday in San Francisco’s Jessie Square, approximately 500 people gathered for a ‘rally to stand up for science.’ Many of the attendees were scientists who had migrated to the rally from the nearby Moscone Center, where some 26,000 Earth scientists are attending the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference this week.

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'Most humans are smarter than a fox, and yet …'—What the Fox pays poetic attention to the population of red foxes with which we share our urban and suburban environments. While often unperceived, these hardy creatures—so well established in Australia—are deeply fascinating to the human ear, eye, and imagination.

Company owned by Centrica gave $20,000 to TPPF, praised by new US energy secretary for opposing ‘hysteria of global warming’

British Gas’s parent company, Centrica, has given tens of thousands of dollars to a US thinktank that denies climate change and is backed by Donald Trump’s energy secretary.

Direct Energy, a US energy company wholly owned by Centrica, donated $20,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in 2010, according to tax filings.

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