DURHAM, N.C. – The western Amazon, home to the most biodiverse and intact rainforest left on Earth, may soon be covered with oil rigs and pipelines.

According to a new study by researchers at 91 and two environmental non-profit organizations, more than 180 oil and gas “blocks” – areas zoned for exploration and development – now cover the western Amazon, which includes Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil. These oil and gas blocks stretch over 170 million acres, an area nearly the size of Texas.

The study appears in the August 13 edition of the open-access journal PLoS ONE. It is online at.

The research team spent three years tracking hydrocarbon activities across the region and generating a comprehensive map of oil and gas activities across the western Amazon. The result, they say, is an alarming assessment of the threats to the biodiversity and indigenous peoples of the region. 

“We found that the oil and gas blocks overlap perfectly with the most biodiverse part of the Amazon for birds, mammals, and amphibians,” says Clinton Jenkins, research associate at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “The threat to amphibians is of particular concern because they already are the most threatened group of vertebrates worldwide.”

Jenkins co-authored the study with Matt Finer of Save America’s Forests, Brian Keane of Land is Life, and Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at the Nicholas School.

Their study found that the oil and gas blocks are concentrated in the most intact part of the Amazon. Even national parks are not immune; exploration and development blocks cover the renowned Yasuní National Park in Ecuador and Madidi National Park in Bolivia.

“The most dynamic situation is unfolding in the Peruvian Amazon,” warns lead author Finer.

Sixty-four oil and gas blocks now cover approximately 121 million acres, or 72 percent, of the Peruvian Amazon. All but eight of these blocks have appeared since 2003, when Peru launched a major effort to boost exploration across the Amazon. National parks are off-limits to hydrocarbon activities in Peru, but many of the blocks encroach or overlap other protected areas, including titled lands of indigenous peoples and territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. These isolated peoples have chosen to live in the forests without contact with the outside world, the paper’s authors note, and are extremely susceptible to outside illnesses due to lack of natural resistance. 

In the second part of the study, Finer and his co-authors address policy issues related to oil and gas activities in the region, particularly the impact of road-building, which they identify as the greatest single threat from hydrocarbon development. They note that roads trigger deforestation, colonization, overhunting, and illegal logging in previously remote areas.

“The elimination of new oil access roads could significantly reduce the impacts of most projects,” Finer says, echoing one of the studies’ main conclusions.

Other policy conclusions include:

  • The current environmental assessment process in the western Amazon is inadequate, due to a lack of independence in the review process and a lack of comprehensive analyses of the long-term, cumulative, and synergistic impacts of multiple oil and gas projects across the wider region. Regional Strategic Environmental Assessments are needed to correct this situation.
  • Complex policy issues related to indigenous peoples must be addressed. "The way that oil development is being pursued in the western Amazon is a gross violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the region" Keane says. "International agreements and Inter-American human rights law recognize that indigenous peoples have rights to their lands, and explicitly prohibit the granting of concessions to exploit natural resources in their territories without their free, prior and informed consent." The study details the growing conflict of hydrocarbon activities slated for the territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. 

Growing global energy demand is driving the search for more oil and gas in the Amazon. Companies from the United States, Canada, Europe, and China are carrying out most of the development, the authors note.

  • “Filling up with a tank of gas could soon have devastating consequences to rainforests, their peoples, and their species,” says Pimm.   

Dire as the situation appears, solutions may be within reach, the fours scientists stress. The Government of Ecuador’s innovative Yasuní-ITT Initiative – a limited-time offer to keep the country’s largest untapped oilfields unexploited in exchange for financial compensation from the international community – serves as a potentially precedent-setting example of how the global community can work together to protect the Amazon and combat climate change.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For help reaching Finer, Jenkins, Keane or Pimm, contact Tim Lucas at 919-613-8084 or tdlucas@duke.edu.