The macroeconomic hypothesis that infrastructure investments stimulate economic growth assumes that these physical assets overcome a logistical or systemic constraint on production. In practice, this requires for individual projects to…
MUKU, Papua New Guinea — Fidelis Nick’s eyes lock onto the police vehicle as it passes through his village in northwestern Papua New Guinea. A few people wave greetings as…
The increasing presence of Chinese companies in South America has become an issue of concern among social and political analysts. Security specialists argue they are a geopolitical threat to the…
The concessionaire system in Peru is managed by the Organismo Supervisor de la Inversión en Infraestructura de Transporte de Uso Público (OSITRAN), which oversees investments in transportation infrastructure, while the…
The challenges to developing waterways have focused investor’s attention on railroads. In 2020, the Amazon Hub of the IIRSA portfolio included eight rail projects, which were either completed (2), under…
The main stem of the Amazon River has provided access to ocean-going cargo ships for centuries, including modern container ships that service the manufacturing sector in Manaus and ore-carriers that…
Designing roads with wildlife in mind is an idea whose time hasn’t come soon enough: nearly a million animals are killed on roads every day, just in the U.S., and…
Katavi National Park is one of the great East African parks. It's great in the sense of being an enormous, 4,471 km2 area of miombo woodland, having a high diversity…
QUITO, Ecuador — Ecuadorians have been given a chance to vote on whether or not they want oil drilling to continue in Yasuní National Park, deep in the northern Amazon…
In the Ecuadorian Amazon, a region marked by half a century of extractive industries, mainly oil, deforestation is a constant. In recent years, a new threat to the conservation of…
Roads are scarce in the Northern Amazon, and surprisingly, the few that exist have not triggered widespread deforestation. This apparent anomaly is largely the consequence of a development dynamic that…
Although never organized as a specific project, the Carretera Marginal de la Selva has emerged from multiple projects that have been established in the Andean foothills from Colombia to Bolivia.…
KATHMANDU — On a hot and humid day in Bardibas, a town in the lowlands of Nepal, the sun beats down on the dusty roads where vans, cars and motorcycles…
In a remote corner of the Brazilian Amazon, federal police agents hovered in helicopters above a massive gash in the rainforest canopy. Below them, gaping craters and muddy pools of…
Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia all invested in major highway building initiatives in the last half of the twentieth century, motivated in part to project sovereignty over their Amazonian provinces.…
It all starts with a road. In Brazil, the federal government commissioned the construction of mule trails and telegraph lines to link their coastal cities with long-established settlements on remote…
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines infrastructure as the ‘underlying structure’ of a country – specifically, the physical installations needed to ensure that its economy functions for the benefit of society. Modern…
JAKARTA — There’s been renewed scrutiny of the infrastructure being built for Indonesia’s new capital city on the island of Borneo following the sighting of a critically endangered orangutan crossing…
The Gran Chaco, South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon, has been steadily replaced by croplands and cattle ranches for decades. Now, the semiarid lowland faces a new threat: the…
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn was a fellow. *Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from…
Nestled within the lofty Cardamom Hills, which forms part of the Western Ghats UNESCO World Heritage Site, lies the picturesque town of Munnar in the southern Indian state of Kerala.…
Engineers and realtors from southern Pará take advantage of their knowledge to abet land grabbers.
JAKARTA — When scientists made the bombshell announcement in 2017 that the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) was a new species, the apes were immediately put under the global spotlight. With…
KATHMANDU — The spring season in the Northern Hemisphere is a critical time for red pandas, particularly in Nepal. This is the period when these furry, tree-dwelling animals spend a…
On the main road of the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas, two ocelots recently jumped out in front of a car. The mother ocelot then went back…
Bolivia’s failure to combat illegal gold mining generated a heated national debate last year. Numerous news sites published investigations into deforestation, pollution and corruption tied to the mining industry, while…
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn is a fellow. SIEM PANG, Cambodia — “Us locals cannot source benefits from the forest…
SAMAL ISLAND, Philippines — Its official name, the Island Garden City of Samal, tells you all you need to know about this bucolic township off the coast of the southern…
KATHMANDU — It starts off like the premise for a joke: “Why did the tigers cross the road?” But for researchers and conservationists in Nepal, the spread of roads throughout…
ALTAMIRA, Brazil — The warehouse donated to house the Castelo dos Sonhos farmers’ market for local growers has stood empty for nearly 15 years. Opened in 2008 and spanning 480…
