SIFAYET ULLAH, Ctg

The Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) has taken an initiative to build a 5km road through the Ramu reserve forest, a move that forest officials and environmentalists say will bring disaster.

LGED’s Cox’s Bazar office prepared a draft proposal involving Tk 22 crore for the planned road to connect Ramu upazila with Cox’s Bazar city at the Marine Drive along the sea beach.

But the LGED neither did an environmental assessment nor obtained permission from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change to build the road through the heart of the reserve forest.

In a letter, the Forest Department warned the LGED against the move, and the initiative has since been put on hold.

The draft proposal, yet to be submitted for approval, comes only months after the government handed over 20 acres of the same reserve forest to the Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) for building a residential training facility.

The handover on July 4 drew heavy criticism from environmentalists, who said the deal with BFF served a fresh blow to the fast-depleting forests in the region.

Now, if the government goes ahead with the road construction, it will mean felling of thousands of trees. It will also cause irreparable damages to wildlife habitats and elephant corridors, forest officials said.

The forest is a corridor and habitat for the endangered Asian Elephant in Cox’s Bazar. It is also home to 117 tree species, 286 bird species and 26 mammal species including hoolock gibbon, leopard cat, fishing cat, tiger, Asian black bear, sloth bear and wild boar, according to Cox’s Bazar Forest Department data.

“Construction of such a structure is prohibited under the Forest Act. They cannot do it without the consent of the Forest Department,” Sarwar Alam, Divisional Forest officer of Cox’s Bazar South Forest Department, told The Daily Star.

A joint study by the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers’ Association (BELA) and Youth Environment Society found 45,990 acres of the 260,046-acre forestland in Cox’s Bazar have been illegally occupied by 43,568 people and 696 public and private organisations over the last decade.