Abstract
Abstract There is a long-standing debate over whether new roads unavoidably lead to environmental damage, especially forest loss, but causal identification has been elusive. Using multiple causal identification strategies, we study the construction of new rural roads to over 100,000 villages and the upgrading of 10,000 kilometers of national highways in India. The new rural roads had precisely zero effect on local deforestation. In contrast, the highway upgrades caused substantial forest loss, which appears to be driven by increased timber demand along the transportation corridors. In terms of forests, last mile connectivity had a negligible environmental cost, while expansion of major corridors had important environmental impacts.
Highlights
Does human economic progress have an unavoidable environmental cost? This is a central question for policymakers pursuing sustainable development and has been a long-standing debate in both the conservation and the economics literature (Arrow et al, 1995; Grossman and Krueger, 1995; Stern, Common and Barbier, 1996; Andreoni and Levinson, 2001; Foster and Rosenzweig, 2003; Dasgupta, 2007; Alix-Garcia et al, 2013)
We focus on the impact of road construction and expansion on forest loss as it is among the primary environmental concerns associated with new road construction
We find no change in forest cover along the North-South and East-West corridor (NS-EW) corridor until construction accelerates in 2008, at which point we observe local forest cover loss
Summary
Does human economic progress have an unavoidable environmental cost? This is a central question for policymakers pursuing sustainable development and has been a long-standing debate in both the conservation and the economics literature (Arrow et al, 1995; Grossman and Krueger, 1995; Stern, Common and Barbier, 1996; Andreoni and Levinson, 2001; Foster and Rosenzweig, 2003; Dasgupta, 2007; Alix-Garcia et al, 2013). We take advantage of a validated satellite-based measure of forest cover (Vegetation Continuous Fields or VCF), which makes it possible to study the impacts of two large-scale transportation projects in India The first of these was an initiative to upgrade two major transportation corridors: the 6000 km “Golden Quadrilateral” network (GQ) connecting the country’s four largest cities, and the comparably-sized “North-South and East-West” network (NS-EW) connecting the country’s four cardinal endpoints in a cross. Large-scale infrastructure often takes many years to build and involves significant land clearing and economic activity during the construction process In both our examination of highways and of rural roads, we find that forest loss begins during the construction period; in either case, estimates based strictly on the timing of infrastructure completion would underestimate the environmental impact of roads.
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