The Biggest Infrastructure Boom in History Threatens Earth's Last Wild Places

We are living in the midst of what William Laurance calls "the most explosive era of infrastructure expansion in human history." Humans are paving over the planet's remaining wilderness faster than ever before, building cities, highways, bridges, dams, mines, and power plants at an unprecedented rate. By midcentury, there will be 60 percent more road, worldwide, than there was in 2010.

Laurance is a world-famous biologist and conservationist, the author of eight books and 400 articles. For years, his work has focused on the encroachment of human development into the wild—his groundbreaking paper published in Nature last year drew international attention to the deceptively immense threat the simple act of road-building posed to the biosphere at large.

According to Laurance's research, by 2050, there will be 15 million miles of paved roads built around the world in total, enough to encircle the globe 600 times. This mass-scale development and concretification of the planet comes at a price, of course. Those roads are cutting through many of our last pristine forests, paving over vital wetlands, and slashing through some of the most diverse wildlife sanctuaries left on earth. And where roads go, development follows—along with consumption, pollution, and deforestation.

This is Laurance's concern. In ​the latest issue of Current Biology, he and a team of colleagues have published a list of nine recommendations to world leaders on how best to address this threat—how to engage in sustainable development, lest we pave over the last of the natural world.

They include sensible imperatives like "In intact habitats, avoid the first cut" and warnings that secondary and tertiary effects of infrastructure projects—like mining and power generation—are "often worse than the project itself." The list is aimed specifically at G20 world leaders and development banks who finance the bulk of the planet's megaprojects. "Leaders of the G20 need a serious rethinking, or we're heading for a serious environmental catastrophe," Laurance told me. "That's not overstating anything."

As the paper notes, development banks tend to prefer to finance sprawling, one-off projects like dams or power plants, "because they have extensive funds available and the administration of a few large projects requires less input and oversight than many small ones."

Currently, there are a vast number of such development projects underway or approved worldwide—considering hydroelectric dams alone, Laurance and his team count 150 slated for the Amazon, a dozen in the Mekong, and multiple in the Congo Basin, each of which will expose some of the most diverse remaining lands to exploitation.

Laurance worries that if the international community is to go through with the projects currently proposed, we will be doing nothing short of "ripping through our last wild places."

And he makes no effort to mask his concern, to temper his words when he describes the scope of the threat, as many scientists are prone to do. When we spoke over the phone, his voice was impassioned. He pulled no punches.

"We're going to see, according to the most current estimates being thrown around, the amount of development—roads, bridges, highways—is going to more than double in the next twenty years," he said.

Just picture that for a second. The amount of infrastructure present now, the major building blocks of modern civilization, doubling.

This certainly isn't the most precise way to demonstrate the idea, but imagine the world you see above, covered as it is with the glint of civilization, with 60 percent more roads, and everything they bring with them. Nature doesn't stand a chance.

And nature is most vulnerable is precisely where it has not yet been razed. "90 percent of the road building will occur in developing nations," Laurance said, where wilderness areas are still more often wild. "There are huge concentrations of endangered species in these areas. High concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

"To give you an example of this," Laurant told me, "in the Amazon basin right now, there are plans for more than 150 hydroelectric dams and projects. Vast areas that can be flooded." But "the real problem comes not from the project itself, but from the roads and infrastructure needed to create this project, and the development" that ensues.

"These are some of the most remote and biologically important ecosystem networks on the planet," he said. After the roads go in, so do the people. And then more roads. And the previous tenants—wildlife, get chased or eked out.

He offered another example: "More than 50,000 kilometers of roads have been built in the Congo basin since 2005," he said. The official roads open space for illegal ones, and routes for poachers. "The epic killing off of forest elephants is a direct result of this development."

In his 2014 paper, Laurance and team noted that roads that carve into wilderness areas are a major "driver of habitat loss and fragmentation, wildfires, overhunting and other environmental degradation, often with irreversible impacts on ecosystems."

In conversation, he is more blunt.

"Let's stop putting these bloody roads in the last surviving wilderness areas on the planet," he said. "Let's build roads where we've already settled to help farmlands." This is a point he's been harping on for years now—Laurance argues that we should be building roads in already-developed, already populous areas, not untarnished wilds. And when we must "make the first cut," we should adhere to sustainable practices and improved communications between industry and environmentalists while doing so.

"We're not anti-development," he hastened to add. "We're anti-stupid development. So much of the development that is happening is ripping apart the world's last wild places."

Laurance says that he's been trying to get the nations where the worst destruction is poised to take place, to little avail. "I've been trying to lobby China for years and years. It's incredibly difficult to penetrate their system, their media."

He singles out China and Brazil's development banks, institutions in charge of financing projects for the world's fastest-growing economies, as particularly responsible for the steamrolling of wild lands and not looking back.

"They just don't have any environmental concerns," Laurance said. "The Chinese are amoral. I don't want to sound prejudiced. But they're operating the way the World Bank was operating in the 1970s—that the environment is a trivial concern. One thing that we need to be doing is putting pressure on the Chinese and Brazilian development banks. And there's still plenty of criticism for the World Bank," he says, which is still prone to fund environmentally damaging projects.

Of course, the biggest issue is the sheer scale of the development. Vast regions of the world are developing at a breakneck pace, from Southeast Asia to Subsaharan Africa to equatorial South America.

Furthermore, convincing federal governments and the multinational corporations fueling the boom to stop laying road, to develop sustainably (and therefore, to their ears, more expensively) is anathema.

"The problem is that the political and economic forces that are behind this development are so powerful and have held sway for so long, that we're really facing an uphill battle," Laurance said. "We need a lot more public discussion about these battles. We're losing the battle. If we continue the status quo, we're going to lose the battle."

When I asked Laurance to offer up his most honest assessment of the future, he barely hesitated.

"I see several different trajectories," he said, "and the most disturbing of these is a profound destruction of nature."