Scientists warn cocaine trade threatening ‘critical’ bird habitats

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

Rampant cocaine smuggling is threatening "critical" bird habitats, warns a new study.

Trafficking of the illicit drug harms the environment and threatens habitats important to dozens of species of migratory birds as well as its human consequences, say scientists.

Two-thirds of the areas that are most important to forest birds – including 67 species of migratory birds that breed in the United States and Canada and overwinter in Central America – are at increased risk from cocaine smuggling activities, according to the report published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

Lead author Professor Amanda Rodewald, senior director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, New York, said: “When drug traffickers are pushed into remote forested areas, they clear land to create landing strips, roads and cattle pastures.

“Those activities – and the counterdrug strategies that contribute to them – can deforest landscapes and threaten species.”

Researchers from four universities, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, combined measures of landscape characteristics and concentrations of migratory birds in Central America to highlight the unexpected connection between drug trafficking and biodiversity.

More than half of the global population of one in five migratory species inhabit areas that became more attractive to trafficking following peak law enforcement pressure, measured as the volume of cocaine seized.

For example, 90% of the world’s population of federally endangered golden-cheeked warblers and 70% of golden-winged warblers and Philadelphia vireos winter in vulnerable landscapes.

The researchers found that the largest remaining forests in Central America, which are disproportionately inhabited by Indigenous people – known as the Five Great Forests, are also seeing growing levels of cocaine trafficking.

Study co-author Professor Nicholas Magliocca, of the University of Alabama, said: “U.S. drug policy in Central America focuses on the supply side of the equation, and law-enforcement pressure plays a significant role in the movement of trafficking routes and locations of narco-deforestation.

“After 40 years that approach has not worked. In fact, cocaine trafficking has only expanded and become a worldwide network.

"It used to be that cocaine was just passing through Central America, but now it’s become a hub of global trans-shipment.”

The study builds on previous research by Magliocca and a core group of researchers examining land-use conditions and decisions made by the traffickers themselves based on perceived risk and profit.

Magliocca said: “This research gives an even fuller accounting of the harms caused by drug trafficking and the way we currently go about fighting it.

“Adaptive behavior by the traffickers must be taken into consideration.

"You have to do more than reactively chase after the drug traffickers, who have nearly unlimited money and power in the region.

"No question it’s a complex, fluid and dangerous situation.”

Rodewald added: “Incorporating measures that build capacity in local communities and governments to monitor and protect their forests, grow alternate forms of income, and resolve unclear land tenure would go a long way.

“Our study is a reminder that we can’t address social problems in a vacuum because they can have unintended environmental consequences that undermine conservation.”