Up until 10 years ago, large sections of the road linking Malawi and Zambia to the Indian Ocean port of Nacala would become nearly impassable during the rainy season, with potholes, damaged bridges and traffic bottlenecks causing long delays along this regional transport artery across northern Mozambique. The Mozambique government has carried out major upgrades to transport infrastructure, but this may have come at the cost of accelerating deforestation across the region.
Between 2017 and 2022, the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the World Bank financed major transportation upgrades along the Nacala Corridor, centered on the 912-kilometer (565-mile) rail line linking coal mines in western Mozambique with ports on the Indian Ocean, as well as road upgrades, to lower costs and improve regional trade connections with Malawi and Zambia.
“This project reduces the ‘penalty of remoteness’ that poorer households pay,” Romulo Cunha Correa, Mozambique country manager for the African Development Bank, told Mongabay in an interview.
The AfDB has prioritized improvements to road and rail infrastructure across the continent, also backing projects linking Cameroon to the cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa on the Congo River, and South Sudan to Indian Ocean ports in Kenya. But researchers studying this expansion of infrastructure have warned that the road upgrades can intensify deforestation and habitat loss.
Manuel Mario Nazare, a conservationist with the NGO Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Mozambique, said new or improved roads can lead to changes in the landscapes they traverse.
“In practice, improved road and logistical access lowers the cost of accessing relatively inaccessible areas, resulting in agricultural expansion, opening new farms, forest exploitation, and dispersed settlements along the road corridor,” he told Mongabay in a phone interview.
“Analyses in northern Mozambique, from Niassa specifically, indicate forest loss mainly along roads and [nearby] settlements, thus clearly indicating human impact related to expansion of land use.” he said.
The environmental and social impact assessment for the Nacala Corridor project indeed warned that potential negative impacts could include deforestation and fragmentation of wildlife habitats, as well as increased erosion and possible impacts on water bodies. It could also lead to displacement, relocation and loss of livelihoods for residents of the project area.
To mitigate environmental harm, Correa said, the AfDB incorporated several safeguards into the project design, including avoiding ecologically sensitive areas, locating construction camps in already degraded zones, and replanting programs to rehabilitate land cleared for the project.
The landscape the Nacala Corridor crosses is dominated by miombo woodland, a mosaic of tropical dry forest and savanna characterized by drought-resistant trees, especially species of Brachystegia, which shed their leaves seasonally.
Stretching across northern Mozambique and into neighboring Malawi and Zambia, the corridor is home to tens of millions of people. Many of these communities rely directly on this dryland forest ecosystem for food, medicine, fuel and timber.
“Miombo is the most important forest ecosystem due to its extent (two-thirds of Mozambique’s forest cover) and ecosystem services it provides for over 60% of the population, urban and rural,” Natasha Sofia Ribeiro, a forest ecologist at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, told Mongabay via email.
She said the woodlands also play a major role in regulating major watersheds such as the Zambezi and Rovuma river basins, and store vast amounts of carbon.
However, she warned that rapid infrastructure expansion is placing increasing pressure on the integrity of the miombo ecosystem in Mozambique.
Paulo Guilherme, the head of the faculty of agricultural sciences at Lurio University in Mozambique’s Nampula province, said that while data measuring the direct impact of transportation upgrades on biodiversity has not yet been gathered, there has been plenty of media coverage of deforestation in several parts of the corridor, including the degradation of mangrove forests in the coastal area around Nacala-a-Velha in northern Mozambique, and loss of miombo in the area of Niassa province between the border town of Mandimba and Cuamba, around 150 km (90 mi) to the east.
According to deforestation monitor Global Forest Watch, Mandimba district lost more than a quarter of its tree cover between 2001 and 2025 — with forest loss accelerating in the years since the AfDB-led corridor upgrades were completed in 2022.
“The Nacala Corridor edges faced increasing deforestation during railway and road upgrades, agriculture, illegal logging and mangrove degradation,” Guilherme told Mongabay.
He said that road and rail upgrades forced the relocation of many farmers, who used fire to clear new land for agriculture and felled trees near their new villages to produce charcoal for sale.
Wezi Kalua, spokesperson for Nacala Logistics, the company that operates rail and freight infrastructure in the corridor, said the upgraded roads have brought tangible benefits for local communities, particularly by improving access to agricultural fields.
“These roads make it easier for people to reach their farm fields,” she said.
