A new road near Taman Negara may well be built at the expense of wildlife and their habitat

Bulldozers are already hard at work at both ends of the new road, located about 45km from Gua Musang. This stretch is labelled as Phase 1-Segment 5, and is just one parcel of a bigger project by the Public Works Department (PWD) to upgrade Federal Route 8, the major thoroughfare that connects Bentong, Pahang, to Gua Musang, Kelantan.

While the existing road curves around oil palm and rubber estates for 13.7km, the realigned road will cut through these plantations as well as some tracts of forest, to cut the route by about half.

Conservationists have questioned the necessity of this shorter route. They say the new road is within the Taman Negara-Sungai Yu corridor, an important ecological bridge between the Main Range and the national park, and an area known to host elephants, tapirs and sun bears.

WWF-Malaysia chief technical officer Surin Suksuwan explains that the Taman NegaraSungai Yu corridor has almost contiguous forest cover- so its preservation will greatly enlarge the available wilderness.

This link is among several earmarked by the Town and Country Planning Department to connect four major forest complexes spanning the length of the peninsula, to form what is called the Central Forest Spine.

These four wild lands - the Main Range, Taman Negara, south-east Pahang-Chini/Bera wetlands and Endau Rompin-Kluang Wildlife Reserve - are crucial for biodiversity and environmental protection but are now fragmented from one another.