Roads can wreak havoc on the environment, according to Nick Haddad, professor of applied ecology at NC State. Haddad said people need to consider the costs to the environment, as well as the benefits to people, when planning and designing road paths because of the serious environmental degradation that is correlated with them.
“Roads can be designed or routed better for wildlife and nature,” Haddad said. “One way to do that is to put roads where there is the lowest diversity of plants and animals. So, the way to do that is to avoid places like tropical forests that are immensely diverse, have huge benefits from those ecosystems to people not just in seeing them, but in cleaner air cleaner water and other ways.”
The land affected by roads and the area that surrounds them around the world nearly doubles the forested area of the Amazon, according to Haddad.
One way that people can make roads better is to restore the nature that is directly next to the road. Roads can be designed in ways that will have less negative impacts on the environment, Haddad said. Some road placements promote erosion and other natural degrading forces, but there are places where this would happen less.
“Roads can be designed to have lower impacts on plants and animals, and so roads can be designed to promote the populations of plants and animals by restoring along the road, so then animals can move up and down the roads or by creating passes under or over roads,” Haddad said.
Roads are dangerous for animals to cross because of collisions with vehicles. Roads also isolate animals and cause them to stay far away from the road, reducing diversity, according to Haddad.
“Corridors sever wild nature, and they sever it in the sense that they cut off pathways for wildlife to move across road and in other ways,” Haddad said. “And so all of a sudden they create barriers to animals and plants that were not there before.”
Population will also affect the degradation of the environment, according to Haddad.
“Our population is going to get bigger and bigger in North Carolina, and so we need to head off the impending devastation that the additional number of people, millions more people, can have on our environment,” Haddad said.
Haddad said we should all be thinking about ways to best preserve our environment.
“Any students sitting here at NC State University or who grew up in North Carolina can see how quickly North Carolina cities are spreading across the landscape, how forests are converted to fields or cities, how wetlands are lost,” Haddad said. “And so if we want to maintain that one thing everybody loves about the environment, which is the beautiful mountain environments, the beautiful coast, then that will be done through having fewer roads or better designed roads,” Haddad said.
Gabby Agnello, a freshman studying animal science, said she thinks roads make humans’ lives easier but pose a long-tern threat to the environment and wildlife.
“I think that, for now, the benefits outweigh the costs, but as we continue building them, that will change,” Agnello said.
Agnello said she believes it is important to design roads in a way that will be less harmful to the environment and wildlife. People need to take the environment into better consideration, especially when the land is prone to erosion, according to Agnello.
“Nature has existed a certain way for a very long time, and our thoughtless expansion may disrupt nature’s balance,” Agnello said.
