I read an article in Spiegel about a study carried out by Pierre Ibish and his team at the German Institute for Sustainable Development (Hochschule für nachhaltige Entwicklung) Eberswalde. What they did was simply to collect data in order to produce a world view of regions not criss-crossed by roads. That gives us a fascinating but also worrying picture of the Earth. It has been long obvious: roads have a major impact on the environment and the more roads you build through nature, the more stress plants and animals have to go through and the less space we have to breathe clean air.

You can see a more specific map for Germany here.

The thing now would be to sistematically identify areas that could be optimized. We should be thinking now not just about where to prevent road encroachment in nature but actually about what roads can be eliminated for sustainable development.