Introduction
In 2022, an illegal road that cut through two strictly protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon threatened to do what conservationists feared most: split the Xingu Socioenvironmental Corridor, a mosaic of Indigenous territories and conservation units covering some 26 million hectares (64 million acres), in half.
Four years later, satellite images reveal that the 42.8-kilometer (26.6-mile) road is gone, swallowed by regrowing forest — something rarely seen in the region.
The Impact of Roads in the Amazon
According to Bruno Ferreira, a researcher at the conservation nonprofit Imazon, part of the MapBiomas mapping network, “Here, the road is the beginning of everything, the beginning of the devastation”.
Usually, roads give birth to a set of new roads (legal or illegal) that spawn from the main one, creating a fishbone pattern in satellite images.
Imazon research suggests that 95% of deforestation in the Amazon happens within 5 km (3 miles) of a road, meaning that illegal cattle ranching and logging would have been virtually unstoppable had this one road been consolidated.
A Rare Success
For the organizations monitoring the region around the Xingu, a key tributary of the Amazon, the now dead road is proof that the alliance between civil society and a willing government can reverse destruction that once seemed irreversible — and a reminder of what is at stake as Brazil heads into a tightly contested presidential election in October.
Conclusion
The disappearance of the illegal road is a rare success in the Amazon, and serves as an example of how joint action between civil society and government can lead to positive results for the conservation of the rainforest.
Source / Reference: Mongabay