A vast network of undocumented “ghost roads” is pushing into the world’s untouched rainforests and driving their destruction in the Asia-Pacific region, a new study has found.

By using Google Earth to map tropical forests on Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea islands, researchers from James Cook University in Australia documented 1.37 m kilometres (850,000 miles) of roads across 1.4m sq kilometres of rainforest on the islands – between three and seven times what is officially recorded on road databases.

These ghost roads, which include bulldozed tracks through natural rainforest and informal roads on palm-oil plantations, were “almost always” an indicator of future destruction of nearby rainforests, according to the study published in the journal Nature. They are “among the gravest of all direct threats to tropical forests”, the researchers concluded.

“They’re being constructed by a range of people, including legal or illegal agriculturalists, miners, loggers, land grabbers, land speculators and drug traffickers,” said Prof Bill Laurance, a co-author of the study. “By sharply increasing access to formerly remote natural areas, unregulated road development is triggering dramatic increases in environmental disruption due to activities such as logging, mining and land-clearing.”

A team of more than 200 trained volunteers and study authors performed the analysis over a combined 7,000 hours. They estimate 640,000 hours would be required to map all of the roads on Earth.

“There are some 25m kilometres of new paved roads expected by mid-century and 90% of all road construction is happening in developing nations, including many tropical and subtropical regions with exceptional biodiversity,” Laurance said.

“Worryingly, our new findings show that the extent and length of roads in the tropical Asia-Pacific is severely underestimated, with many roads being out of government control. In these findings, nature is the big loser.”

The researchers said their findings tally with earlier studies in Cameroon, Solomon Islands and Brazil, with road building almost always preceding local forest loss.

“Informally or illicitly constructed ghost roads can be bulldozed tracks in logged forests, roads in palm-oil plantations and other roads missing from existing road datasets for various reasons,” said Laurance.

Last year, the destruction of the world’s most pristine rainforests continued at a relentless rate despite efforts to slow the loss. While there were falls in Colombia and Brazil, the world lost an area nearly the size of Switzerland from previously undisturbed forests.

The survival of rainforests is essential to meeting the goals of the Paris agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C and the Kunming-Montreal framework on biodiversity.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

The new Irish taoiseach is to meet the Spanish prime minister to discuss their joint plan to recognise Palestine as a nation state and their attempts to force the EU to assess Israel’s human rights obligations as a condition of their trade deal with the bloc.

Pedro Sánchez, who is due to arrive in Dublin on Friday, is the first foreign premier Simon Harris will meet since his promotion to the office of the taoiseach this week.

In the months since the Hamas attacks of 7 October and Israel’s offensive in Gaza, Spain and Ireland have emerged as the EU’s most pro-Palestinian member states.

On Thursday in Brussels, Harris said he had made clear Ireland’s position on the need for an immediate ceasefire, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. He also reiterated its formal request, made with Spain two months ago, to review the Israel-EU association agreement.

“I believe the European Union must use all of the levers at its disposal [to protect the Palestinian people],” Harris said.

His remarks came as he faced sharp criticism from Israel for not mentioning the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza during his debut speech to the Irish parliament as taoiseach.

Harris – who was sworn in on Tuesday – spoke on Tuesday of “the unforgivable terrorist actions of Hamas on 7 October”, as well as “the disproportionate reaction of the Israeli government”.

But Israel’s foreign ministry, in a statement released on Thursday, criticised him for neglecting to mention the hostages still being held by Hamas.

It said Ireland was also “planning to award additional prizes to terrorism” by intervening in the case taken by South Africa at the international court of justice in which it accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, and by “the possible recognition of a Palestinian state in the future”.

“After the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust … there are those in Ireland who persist on being on the wrong side of history,” the statement added, alluding to the Hamas attacks on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Since then, Israel’s military offensive has killed more than 33,000 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, and created an acute humanitarian crisis.

Ireland and Spain have written a letter to the European Commission chief asking for an “urgent review” of whether Israel is complying with its human rights obligations. Neither country has had a response yet, indicating the sensitivity of the issue.

On Thursday, Harris said Sánchez was a welcome guest to Dublin. “He’ll be the first head of government that I will welcome to government buildings, and I look forward to having the opportunity to discussing with Pedro the issue of the recognition of the state of Palestine and broader matters, including that letter,” he said.

Harris said Von der Leyen pointed out there was an opportunity at the next summit of EU foreign ministers “to discuss and consider these matters”, indicating a review was in the works.

“This is not about anything other than ensuring that international human rights law is respected. And that it is followed,” he said.

You have to admire the chutzpah of Apple TV+. They’ve chosen to make an eight-part miniseries out of the towering intellectual-slash-action figure of Benjamin Franklin – the son of a Boston candlemaker, who ran away to Philadelphia at 17 and rose to become one of the US’s founding fathers, via polymathic stints as a printer, publisher, inventor, writer and scientist. And they’ve based it on what was surely one of the least televisual accomplishments of his entire storied career.

Franklin (whose eponymous hero is played by Michael Douglas) is adapted from the historian Stacy Schiff’s 2005 book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America. It tells the story of the then 70-year-old statesman’s unofficial eight-year-long series of negotiations with the Gallic great and good, beginning in 1776 as America’s losses in the revolutionary war looked set to crush the young nation before it had fairly begun. Over to Paris hops Benjamin in the hope that the – well, let’s call them longstanding contretemps – between the French and the English would help him persuade the former to provide money, weapons and other supplies to the beleaguered seekers after independence.

His teenage grandson Temple (Noah Jupe) accompanies him – not his son, William, because he is a wellknown loyalist (and the less charming Frenchmen Franklin meets like to bring this shame up from time to time). Temple learns a lot about diplomacy and even more about fashion and fornication as he is taken under the wing of the Marquis de Lafayette (later to become a hero of révolutions américaine et française and more importantly, a star in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton), played by Théodore Pellerin. Metaphors about seduction and chess abound as grandfather tries to keep the boy’s focus on their real mission.

Unfortunately for the viewer, that mission is composed mostly of meetings. Some more clandestine than others, but mostly in virtually indistinguishable chateaux with virtually indistinguishable French ministers and rich men. Those we do learn to pick out – such as the secretly sympathetic foreign minister Comte de Vergennes (Thibault de Montalembert) and the wealthy merchant Chaumont (Olivier Claverie), who decides to help fund US independence for the trading opportunities that would result – too often get sidelined by lesser characters. We spend too much time with the pawns in this monumental chess game, when we would really rather be concentrating on the alliances and treacheries among the main pieces.

Franklin is dogged by the same slight but dreary sense of worthiness that attended Apple’s other recent foray into US period drama, the meticulous Manhunt (about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the conspiracy behind it, and – almost as a distasteful afterthought – the capture and trial of his killer, John Wilkes Booth). This time, though, it doesn’t even have the background pursuit of a murderer to keep things moving. Douglas is wholly convincing as the experienced but idiosyncratic statesman and 18th-century celebrity. And he has his usual undeniable presence (so compelling but always with a hint of creepiness at the edges). But Franklin himself was wearying by this point in his illustrious career and it feels as though we are concentrating on the wrong part of his astonishing story. And when Congress becomes frustrated with Franklin’s perceived lack of progress and send John Adams (Eddie Marsan) over instead, Douglas/Franklin has to join le comte and Chaumont towards the sidelines too.

Doubtless it plays slightly better in its native land, where Franklin’s more immediately interesting and understandable accomplishments are better known. It probably feels more like a wrong being righted as an underacknowledged period of the national hero’s life is given its due. Whether this is quite enough to bring the punters in and satisfy the expectations for entertainment they have – mostly rightly – come to expect from Apple TV+, I am not nearly so sure.