New infrastructure that seeks to connect Iquitos with Saramiriza includes building a ~350-km paved road alongside the Tigre river in Loreto. This project is a threat to the conservation of one of the largest areas of tropical forest on the planet and the largest and deepest peatlands in the Amazon basin. In this study, focused on the second section of the proposed road (Huambé – Marsella), we used a “business-as-usual” scenario (BAU) and a “road” scenario to show that road construction would lead to substantial loss of forest cover and increase CO2 emissions. The current loss of forest cover in a buffer zone of 20 km around the Huambé-Marsella road, estimated up to 2018, was 3.4 %. Using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network, we estimated deforestation of 80 071.11 ha and emissions of 35.55 Mt CO2 -eq for the period 2019-2064 in the BAU scenario, while the scenario wi...

New infrastructure that seeks to connect Iquitos with Saramiriza includes building a ~350-km paved road alongside the Tigre river in Loreto. This project is a threat to the conservation of one of the largest areas of tropical forest on the planet and the largest and deepest peatlands in the Amazon basin. In this study, focused on the second section of the proposed road (Huambé – Marsella), we used a “business-as-usual” scenario (BAU) and a “road” scenario to show that road construction would lead to substantial loss of forest cover and increase CO2 emissions. The current loss of forest cover in a buffer zone of 20 km around the Huambé-Marsella road, estimated up to 2018, was 3.4 %. Using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network, we estimated deforestation of 80 071.11 ha and emissions of 35.55 Mt CO2 -eq for the period 2019-2064 in the BAU scenario, while the scenario wi...