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.
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