Análisis económico y ambiental de carreteras propuestas dentro de ...

construction and maintenance consume more resources than can possibly be offsetby savings in transportation expenditures and induced benefits from tourism. In theformer case, this finding can be explained by the fact that unmet local transportationdemand is low and international demand is already served by a route – via Belize – thatis almost the same length as the proposed route through the MBR. Low local demand isalso the driving force in the San Andres-Mirador results.Environmental sustainability would also be poorly served by building new roads inthe MBR. Deforestation, fire and habitat fragmentation would deprive the MBR of theenvironmental goods and services that led the Guatemalan Congress to establish it in1990. While better roads could eventually facilitate tourists’ access to more sites withinthe reserve, substantial and continuous control expenditures would be needed to avoiddestruction of those very same sites. Tikal National Park, where a paved road has notled to deforestation, is a useful indicator of the scale of that control cost. CurrentlyTikal has 32 times as many conservation technicians (“técnicos”) and six times as manypark guards per unit area as the rest of the MBR.Other investments should be sought to improve international and local transportationin the border region of Guatemala, Mexico and Belize. Likewise, alternativeinvestments should be studied to increase living standards in and around the MBR.Rigorous economic, environmental and equity criteria should be applied to ensure thatpublic spending leads to real, lasting development and preserves Guatemala’s naturalheritage.Parallel to this study, a collaborating team (Amor et al. 2007) carried out a regionalanalysis of road impacts on the Selva Maya and the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor(MBC). In both studies the same internal analysis of transport economics of the SanAndrés-Mirador and the Tikal-Caobas projects was used, so the results are the same.The environmental externality valuation results are different because of differencesin the deforestation models used in the two studies. The regional model used lessvariables, because obtaining comparable data for different countries was not practical.The local analysis projects changes that would occur in the Maya Biosphere Reserve indetail, while the regional analysis explains the implications of roads over broad areason Northern Mesoamerica.Análisis Económico y Ambiental de Carreteras Propuestas dentro de la Reserva de la Biosfera Maya 2 1