Trans-national conservation and infrastructure development in the Heart of Borneo.

Thor-Seng Liew,Sean Sloan,Mohammed Alamgir,William F Laurance,Mason J Campbell,Jayden Engert,Alex M Lechner

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0221947

Thor-Seng Liew, Sean Sloan + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221947

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Abstract

The Heart of Borneo initiative has promoted the integration of protected areas and sustainably-managed forests across Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei. Recently, however, member states of the Heart of Borneo have begun pursuing ambitious unilateral infrastructure-development schemes to accelerate economic growth, jeopardizing the underlying goal of trans-boundary integrated conservation. Focusing on Sabah, Malaysia, we highlight conflicts between its Pan-Borneo Highway scheme and the regional integration of protected areas, unprotected intact forests, and conservation-priority forests. Road developments in southern Sabah in particular would drastically reduce protected-area integration across the northern Heart of Borneo region. Such developments would separate two major clusters of protected areas that account for one-quarter of all protected areas within the Heart of Borneo complex. Sabah has proposed forest corridors and highway underpasses as means of retaining ecological connectivity in this context. Connectivity modelling identified numerous overlooked areas for connectivity rehabilitation among intact forest patches following planned road development. While such ‘linear-conservation planning’ might theoretically retain up to 85% of intact-forest connectivity and integrate half of the conservation-priority forests across Sabah, in reality it is very unlikely to achieve meaningful ecological integration. Moreover, such measure would be exceedingly costly if properly implemented–apparently beyond the operating budget of relevant Malaysian authorities. Unless critical road segments are cancelled, planned infrastructure will fragment important conservation landscapes with little recourse for mitigation. This likelihood reinforces earlier calls for the legal recognition of the Heart of Borneo region for conservation planning as well as for enhanced tri-lateral coordination of both conservation and development.

Highlights

Road infrastructure expansion across the Global South is increasingly recognized as a key factor in regional conservation and development planning [1,2,3], on par with demographic growth, urbanization, and climate change
We explored differences in the regional distributions of key inter-patch linkages amongst two scenarios of road development varying according to the permeability of planned roadways to faunal movements
Most protected areas (PAs) connectivity in the Heart of Borneo initiative (HoB) is concentrated in a single intact forest patch spanning southern and eastern Sabah, northern and central Kalimantan, eastern Sarawak, and Brunei (Fig 3A)

Summary

Introduction

Road infrastructure expansion across the Global South is increasingly recognized as a key factor in regional conservation and development planning [1,2,3], on par with demographic growth, urbanization, and climate change. In Sabah, Malaysia, the focus of this study, an ambitious embrace of the CBD via the aligned Sabah Biodiversity Strategy [16] is fulfilling various CBD targets Prominent goals within this Strategy include expanded protected-area coverage to >20%, the protection of key habitats outside of protected areas via enhanced forest connectivity, and the conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes via cooperation with neighboring countries and states [16]. For both Sabah and the Global South generally, international cooperation is increasingly necessary to realize enhanced regionally-integrated conservation [15, 17,18,19]. Achieving enhanced protectedarea coverage while neglecting losses to regional connectivity posed by infrastructure megaprojects will prove insufficient to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem resilience [21]

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