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19 February 2010
Two-Thirds of Peru's Amazon Threatened by Oil and Gas Development
Source: e360 Digest

Petroleum companies have leased 41 percent of the Peruvian Amazon for oil and gas drilling and could soon hold drilling concessions on 70 percent of the highly diverse rainforest, according to a new study. Conducted by researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the conservation group Save America’s Forests, the study said that a second wave of oil and gas drilling is spreading so rapidly through the Peruvian Amazon that roughly 20 percent of officially protected areas, as well as more than half of reserves set aside for indigenous people, are now leased for drilling. The oil and gas boom is so intensive that it now extends to many of the remotest corners of the Peruvian Amazon, including an area deep in the rainforest — known as Block 67 — that may sit atop 300 million barrels of oil. The study was conducted by amassing official drilling information from the Peruvian government and using Geographical Information Systems data to overlay the concessions on detailed maps. The study said that the drilling boom poses a major threat to the well-documented biodiversity of the Peruvian Amazon, which contains the second largest area of rainforest in the Amazon outside of Brazil. The current oil and gas exploration boom is the second major one to hit the Peruvian Amazon, following an initial surge of exploration in the 1970s and 1980s.

See this article at : http://e360.yale.edu/content/digest.msp?id=2282

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