Infrastructure expansion challenges sustainable development in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

The island of New Guinea hosts the third largest expanse of tropical rainforest on the planet. Papua New Guinea—comprising the eastern half of the island—plans to nearly double its national road network (from 8,700 to 15,000 km) over the next three years, to spur economic growth. We assessed these plans using fine-scale biophysical and environmental data. We identified numerous environmental and socioeconomic risks associated with these projects, including the dissection of 54 critical biodiversity habitats and diminished forest connectivity across large expanses of the island. Key habitats of globally endangered species including Goodfellow’s tree-kangaroo ( Dendrolagus goodfellowi ), Matchie’s tree kangaroo ( D . matschiei ), and several birds of paradise would also be bisected by roads and opened up to logging, hunting, and habitat conversion. Many planned roads would traverse rainforests and carbon-rich peatlands, contradicting Papua New Guinea’s international commitments to promote low-carbon development and forest conservation for climate-change mitigation. Planned roads would also create new deforestation hotspots via rapid expansion of logging, mining, and oil-palm plantations. Our study suggests that several planned road segments in steep and high-rainfall terrain would be extremely expensive in terms of construction and maintenance costs. This would create unanticipated economic challenges and public debt. The net environmental, social, and economic risks of several planned projects—such as the Epo-Kikori link, Madang-Baiyer link, Wau-Malalaua link, and some other planned projects in the Western and East Sepik Provinces—could easily outstrip their overall benefits. Such projects should be reconsidered under broader environmental, economic, and social grounds, rather than short-term economic considerations.

Pattern and Trend of Land Surface Temperature Change on New Guinea Island

“…28 (4): 1517-1529 Vegetation or healthy plants in an area were affected by LST variation (Rahmad et al, 2019). Two studies reported on the increasing rate of forest conversion in the areas of Papua New Guinea and Papua (Alamgir et al, 2019;Austin et al, 2019). This deforestation is suspected to be the cause of an increase in temperatures in the area.…”

Emerging challenges for sustainable development and forest conservation in Sarawak, Borneo

“…We obtained spatial data on planned and ongoing road and dam construction projects in Sarawak from a variety of regional and national sources in an endeavour to include the majority of the projects in our analyses. We digitized the Pan-Borneo Highway, Sarawak (Fig 1) from the project's map [11,32] following the procedures listed in Alamgir et al [21,23] and Sloan et al [26]. The project map was prepared using fine scale biophysical data for the project design and implementation [11,32].…”

“…Connectivity is important for wildlife communities to shift from one suitable habitat to another across the landscape. We assessed the impacts of the highway and hydroelectric dams on landscape connectivity in Sarawak conducting a morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) using Graphical User Interface for the Description of Image Objects and their Shapes (Guidos Toolbox 2.6 version 4) [36, 37], following Alamgir et al [21,23] and Sloan et al [22]. The MSPA analysis delineated forest areas in Sarawak into distinct forest-landscape elements including core forest (forest � 500 m from the nearest forest edge), connectivity forest (forest corridors that connect different core forest patches or different segments of a core-forest patch) and edge forest (forest < 500 m from an edge).…”

“…This threshold is conservative, as edge effects can extend up to several kilometres into a forest interior [18]. Thresholds of 500 to 1000-m are widely used in road-impact research [21,23,39,40].…”

“…The Pan-Borneo Highway and hydroelectric dams in Sarawak substantially threaten the remaining biodiversity of the region through several means-direct habitat loss through forest clearing, forest inundation, dissecting protected areas and key habitats, habitat fragmentation, core-forest degradation, and habitat isolation (Figs 2, 3 and 5). Negative impacts of infrastructure expansion on biodiversity have already been reported from several areas in the region, such as nearby Sabah, Malaysia[31], Indonesian Borneo [21] and New Guinea [23,26].…”