Abstract
In the Ecuadorian Amazon—one of Earth’s last high-biodiversity wilderness areas and home to uncontacted indigenous populations—50 years of widespread oil development is jeopardizing biodiversity and feeding environmental conflicts. In 2019, a campaign to eliminate oil-related gas flaring, led by Amazonian communities impacted by fossil fuel production, resulted in an injunction against the Ecuadoran Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Natural Resources and the Ministry of Environment and Water. On 26 January 2021 the Court of Nueva Loja issued a historical order to ban gas flaring in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The present citizen science project played an important role in this process, enabling the production of independent spatial information through participatory mapping with indigenous and farmer communities. Globally, lack of independent information about oil activities has led to the monitoring of gas flaring by satellite imagery, achieving remarkable results. However, apart from institutional and remotely sensed data, reliable spatial information on gas flaring in the Ecuadorian Amazon is not available. Therefore, we adopted the community-based participatory action research approach to develop a participatory GIS process, aiming both to provide reliable data and to support social campaigns for environmental and climate justice. This work presents the first participatory mapping initiative of gas flaring at a regional scale, carried out completely through open source data and software. Having identified 295 previously unmapped gas flaring sites through participatory mapping, we highlight that the extent of gas flaring activities is well beyond the official data provided by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Environment and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Nightfire annual datasets, which map only 24% and 33% of the sites, respectively. Seventy five of the detected sites were in the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve. Moreover, 39 of the identified sites were venting instead of flaring, a phenomenon never before documented in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This study demonstrates that, because official datasets and satellite imagery underestimate the extent of gas flaring in the Ecuadorian Amazon, community-based mapping offers a promising alternative for producing trusted, community-based scientific data. This community-produced data can support campaigns for legal recognition of human rights and environmental justice in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Finally, this study shows how local environmental conflicts can foster policy transformations that promote climate justice.
Highlights
Participative cartography of gas flaring sites in Ecuadorian Amazon region (EAR) The participatory mapping campaign resulted in the mapping of 295 gas flaring sites, for a total of 437 single stacks
25% of the mapped gas flaring sites are in the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve (YBR)
This work represents the first attempt to monitor gas flaring activities by combining remote sensing-based methods with a participatory, citizen science approach to develop a ground validated dataset at the regional scale. It empowered local communities through the creation of data to support a lawsuit demanding a ban of gas flaring activities in the EAR
Summary
To limit global warming to 1.5 ◦C by 2050, recent studies based on an updated baseline scenario suggest that about 81% of oil, 86% of natural gas and 97% of coal must remain ‘locked underground’ (Welsby et al 2021) These predictions have led to the ‘unburnable carbon’ framework, steering the global agenda toward more effective climate policies that focus on transitions to clean energy, as well as decarburization processes (Jakob and Hilaire 2015, van der Ploeg and Rezai 2017, Erickson et al 2018, Green 2018, Piggot et al 2018). The ‘Yasuní-ITT Initiative’ embodies an inclusive approach to unburnable carbon, combining conservation priorities with human rights protection to keep fossil fuels underground in a crucial sector of the Amazon rainforest (Martinez-Alier et al 2014, Vallejo et al 2015, Fierro 2017, Macintosh and Constable 2017). Such unintended ‘unleakable carbon’ is mainly produced by gas flaring activities, which are sources of direct and indirect environmental and social impacts (Hendrick et al 2017)
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