Infrastructure expansion and the Indonesian Borneo tropical forests

Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan) houses ~41 million hectares of tropical forest with global environmental significance. Currently, numerous infrastructure expansion projects are occurring in the region aiming to boost economic growth. We spatially analyzed the potential impacts of this infrastructure expansion on tropical forests and agro-economic development in the region. We found that many routes will entail numerous detrimental ecological impacts, including limiting faunal movement, reducing habitat connectivity, creating isolated forest patches, fragmenting current intact forests, substantially increasing forest edge effects, and reducing core forests habitat area. Furthermore, several routes will dissect a number of current protected areas, potentially undermining Indonesian efforts to achieve the Aichi target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) i.e. 17% terrestrial protected area connectivity by 2020. These infrastructure expansions are likely to facilitate the further development of extractive industries, namely, mining, logging, and oil palm estate agriculture but they are highly unlikely to generate the envisioned agro-economic development. Our study suggests that the current increasing trend of infrastructure expansion- ignoring the environmental values at the core of the approach- sharply increases the likelihood of serious ecosystem decay in the tropical forests of Indonesian Borneo