Some of the world’s most biodiverse areas facing oil/gas threat from Peru parks bill
Protected areas in the Amazon particularly at risk from controversial proposal by Congressman
A Peruvian politician has caused consternation and outrage in some quarters of the country by proposing a bill to radically alter legislation that would allow, inter alia, oil, gas, mining and other extractive operations in national parks and other off-limits protected areas. Proposed by Jorge Luis Flores Ancachi, a Congressman from the Puno region, the bill is nothing less than an attack on the fundamental nature and integrity of Peru’s protected areas system which dates back more than 60 years to 1961 when the country’s first park, Cutervo, was established.
Among the areas most at threat is the globally recognised Bahuaja Sonene National Park, which some years ago National Geographic declared one of the world’s seven “iconic natural sanctuaries.” The existence of large gas deposits under Bahuaja Sonene has been known since exploration by US company Mobil in the 1990s, and Perupetro has been formally promoting its potential to the international energy industry, despite the current ban on extractive operations in parks. In response to criticism of his bill, Flores Ancachi was talking up the possibility of exploiting Bahuaja Sonene only a few days ago.
Other areas at threat include the even more well-known Manu National Park, which for years UNESCO called the “most biodiverse place on earth.” The map above shows an area which has been frequently - and mistakenly? - referred to as the “Tren Gasífero” which runs right through Manu and was described last year by the Energy Ministry as the location of a “new gas deposit” double the size of the Camisea reserves immediately to Manu’s west which have been exploited since the early 2000s.
At an energy industry conference held last month, called PERU ENERGIA Sur Cusco, a Perupetro presentation named this area the “Trend Regional Gasífero Camisea-Candamo” where oil and gas potential is “high.” It “extends across the regions of Cusco, Madre de Dios and Puno,” Perupetro stated, and “includes the protected natural areas of Manu National Park, the Megantoni National Sanctuary, the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve and the Bahuaja Sonene National Park.”
Unsurprisingly, the pushback from Peruvian civil society against Flores Ancachi’s bill has been fierce, with much of the opposition focusing on how it violates and/or compromises Peru’s Constitution, indigenous peoples’s rights, government policies on energy, climate and conservation, and many of the country’s international obligations, in addition to the obvious risks that it poses to some of Peru’s most stunning locations and landscapes and the territories and livelihoods of indigenous peoples. In a statement released yesterday by four indigenous organisations, including CONAP and FENAP, and two other groups, the bill was described as a direct threat to the Amazon and indigenous peoples in particular, and another example of Congress ignoring the right of indigenous peoples to be consulted about laws and regulations that affect them.
“The main interest is operating in Manu, Bahuaja Sonene, the Amarakaeri Reserve and the Alto Purus National Park where many indigenous people live, including those in isolation and initial contact, among some of the most vulnerable people in the world,” that statement charged. “Our last bastions of nature conservation and biodiversity are not for sale. In the midst of the climate crisis, it would be CRIMINAL to strip the protection of these areas [for extractive purposes], above all because of the long history of spills and impacts that [the oil and gas industry] has had on our country.”
Prior to that, another 39 organisations, including well-known NGOs like Derecho Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (DAR), and more than 100 individuals had put their names to a stinging statement rejecting Flores Ancachi’s bill. Among numerous other criticisms, that statement argued its approval would “result in Peru’s failure to comply with its international commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Trade Promotion Agreement with the US, which prohibit the rollback of environmental protections in favour of promoting investment. The bill also represents a serious setback in the climate and energy transition commitments contained in our current National Energy Policy. It’s paradoxical that instead of promoting policies to transition away from dependence on oil and gas, there are certain sectors posing threats to our natural heritage.”
Some of the organisations signing that statement have released their own individual ones too. These include an association of religious and spiritual groups, the Iniciativa Interreligiosa para los Bosques Tropicales, which called the bill an “immense risk to nature and the people who depend on the services it provides”, and DAR, which highlighted, among other things, the number of Peru’s international obligations that it would compromise.
“This would place Peru in breach of several international commitments,” DAR stated, “including the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Framework on Climate Change, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the Bonn Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, among others.”
As a 30-page legal analysis of the bill by the NGO Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental (SPDA) details, the main thrust is to modify nine articles of the 1997 Protected Natural Areas Law as well as add several “complementary disposition” clauses to the end. Arguably the most concerning proposal is the one permitting the exploitation of “renewable and non-renewable natural resources” - when subsequently declared “in the public need and national interest” - in protected areas classified as “indirect use”, which means national parks, such as Manu, national sanctuaries and historic sanctuaries. That would open the way to oil, gas, mining, logging and other operations in those kinds of protected areas, which until now has generally been prohibited.
Among other proposed changes, the bill seeks to make it easier for the Executive power to reduce the size of protected areas, to subordinate the protected areas system to energy security policies, and to give greater powers to the Energy Ministry in creating protected areas and writing the Management Plans for them, which could be particularly disastrous for somewhere like the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve where oil and gas operations are already permitted but it is co-managed by indigenous representatives. In addition, the bill aims to declare the “massification” of gas across much of Peru’s Amazon to be in the “national interest.”
Is Peru now going to become, in practice, a “country without any protected natural areas” asked Marc Dourojeanni in a withering response to Flores Ancachi’s proposals? A key personality in Peru’s parks system ever since it got going in the 1960s, Dourojeanni believes that the bill removes the “protection from protected natural areas and transforms them into spaces open to virtually any type of exploitation or use that interested parties wish to give them. The most affected categories are, precisely, the most biologically famous and valuable.”
Flores Ancachi, who argues his bill is intended to raise revenues for infrastructure and social programs, did not respond to a request for an interview.