Environmentalists protest against road construction in Sinharaja Forest, write to UNESCO
COLOMBO – The Centre for Environment and Nature Studies (CENS), protesting against the construction of a road inside the Sinharaja World Heritage Site, has filed a complaint with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), calling for its intervention to stop the construction.
In a letter to the UN body, the National Coordinator for CENS, Ravindra Kariyawasam, has noted that the road construction, in the buffer zone and inside the Sinharaja world heritage site extending from the Lankagama area to Deniyaya, is a government project being carried out by the Sri Lanka Army and that construction work has been going on since August 10.
The letter also notes that the construction, initially launched in 2013, had been halted by UNESCO following a complaint filed by the CENS.
It adds that environmentalists had lodged complaints with the Sri Lanka Forest Department, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the Ministry of Environment, and the Central Environment Authority, but to no avail.
Sri Lanka’s last viable area of primary tropical rainforest, the Sinharaja Forest Reserve, was designated as a Biosphere Reserve in 1978 and World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1988. While 60% of the trees in Sinharaja are endemic, many of them considered rare, the Forest Reserve is also home to over 50% of Sri Lanka’s endemic species of mammals and butterflies, as well as many kinds of insects, reptiles and rare amphibians.
Kariyawasam, in his letter notes that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in its Conservation Outlook Assessment (2017), had cited the conservation status of the Sinharaja Forest Reserve as being of ‘significant concern’, noting the value of forest reserve as a natural world heritage site continues to be recognized by the discovery of several endemic species of plants and animals since the declaration of the forest as a world heritage in 1988. Some of the recent discoveries include several species of herpetofauna that are restricted to the eastern region of Sinharaja, the letter adds, calling upon the world heritage body to initiate action against the illegal road construction and help the CENS protect the virgin forest land in Sri Lanka.
-ENCL