Peru has the most oil and gas projects heading into production in the Amazon, according to a new data set published by the Stockholm Environment Institute. At 85 blocks in pre-production in the rainforest, that’s more than the 68 in Colombia and 53 in Brazil.
Peru has 173 oil and gas lease blocks in total, 59% of them located in its Amazonian region, covering 48 million hectares (119 million acres) of forest, or more than a third of the country’s total area. In the Brazilian Amazon, lease blocks cover 28 million hectares (69 million acres), and in Colombia 18 million hectares (44 million acres).
A Mongabay estimate found that, based on the data set, 17% of the leases in Peru, or 5.85 million hectares (14.47 million acres), overlap with protected areas and 25.6%, or 12.36 million hectares (30.54 million acres), overlap with Indigenous territories. Image by Andrés Alegría/Mongabay.
The impacted ares include San Matias-San Carlos Protection Forest and parts of Sierra del Divisor National Park. Numerous Indigenous communities are affected by the leases, including the Kukama-Kukamiria, Achuar, Kichwa, Quechua and Urarina communities.
Mauricio Pinzás Luna, a geographer at the Peruvian NGO CooperAcción, told Mongabay that fossil fuel extraction in the Peruvian Amazon comes with high risks and such exploitation should not be allowed. He told Mongabay over WhatsApp voice messages that communities that live near these blocks suffer from water contamination, oil spills, deforestation, and new roads that attract illegal miners and other criminals. Such activities destroy livelihoods and culture, he said.
Several rivers, such as the Marañón and Ucayali, that both feed into the Amazon, run through several blocks in pre-production. Local people depend on these rivers for sustenance, Pinzás Luna said. “The impact on communities stems from their vulnerability — in this case, their dependence on [contaminated] fish, but also their use of direct water sources, as there is no supply of potable water,” he said.
The Northern Peruvian Oil Pipeline runs directly through some of the lease blocks, as well as through Indigenous Achuar communities and close to Wampis territory. It has ruptured several times, and conservationists and Indigenous communities have raised concerns about the increased risk of spills during excavation and construction of the pre-production lease blocks across the Peruvian Amazon.
Mongabay contacted Peru’s environment and energy ministries for comment, but didn’t receive a response by the time this story was published.
Banner image: A protest held in the Yankuntich community against Petroperú‘s oil exploitation plans. Image courtesy of Handrez García/FENAP.
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