Latest update January 30th, 2025 6:10 AM
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Lethem road link could threaten ecosystem
A section of the Lethem road
As Guyana promotes economic development through the use of its natural and ecosystem services, many lessons can be learnt from Brazil’s experiences.
Executive Director of Conservation International, Dr. David Singh, in noting that Guyana’s Cabinet endorsed Lethem and Linden/Lethem Road Development Plans last week, expressed the view that there was much that Guyana could learn from the experiences in neighbouring Brazil.
In a release, Dr. Singh said that he welcomed the announcement that a development body or agency will be set up to implement the Linden/Lethem
Road Development Plan, stressing that the experiences in the Amazon Basin provide excellent guidance.
He pointed to an article published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (February 2008), which described a hybrid governance structure for road management in the Amazon in which a range of stakeholders participate, including government, local communities and NGOs.
The article concluded that improved governance could help reduce the future impact of roads without diminishing economic prospects in the region.
In the scientific publication, University of Florida Sociologist Stephen Perz and colleagues cite road building as a key determinant of land use.
Roads reduce the cost of movement, capital and information, and foster access to natural resources and markets for local communities.
At the same time, however, roads fragment habitats, degrade stream networks and water quality, foster the spread of exotic invasive species, cause social conflicts, wildlife and species loss, and may catalyse climate change.
In most cases, a release from Conservation International stated, the worst effects are as a result of unplanned and often illegal road networks that spring up as persons create adjacent networks of roads to exploit natural resources.
Studies in the Amazon Basin show that the 300,000 km tri-national frontier MAP Region connecting Brazil, Bolivia and Peru with a population of 700 would be 67 percent deforested by 2050 with unplanned development.
This will contribute an additional 3.8 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere, far more than the Caribbean’s total carbon emissions from fossil fuel use over the same period.
Apart from a sound plan and good participatory governance systems, there are other land management systems that could be applied.
Last week, Brazil’s Environment Minister Carlos Mine announced that the Brazilian Government was going to delay construction contracts for BR-319, a highway that connects Manaus (Amazonas) and Porto Velho (Rondonia).
The much needed road project was halted to allow for the completion of the demarcation of 13 protected areas, to reduce the threat of deforestation and other negative ecological consequences along the road.
Environmentalists say that the establishment of planned conservation zones will greatly mitigate the impacts of road development on forests.
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