2010 was named internationally as the International Year for Combating Biodiversity Loss, but it seems that neither globally nor locally there was significant progress on this issue that should have culminated in a major agreement at the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit. This did not happen and from Nagoya there is not even a date to stop the rampant loss of biodiversity, nor funding to achieve it, so that the Summit became another missed opportunity to safeguard the future of biodiversity on Earth.
In Ecuador, the Yasuní case deserves special attention; the oil spills in the coastal area of the Santa Elena Peninsula, the cases of non-compliance in the reforestation of shrimp farms, and other cases that we will analyze that occurred this year in our country, home to one of the greatest genetic varieties of animals and plants on the planet.
In the case of Yasunì, with nearly one million hectares of virgin tropical forest, and with the highest number of tree species per hectare in the world; (one hectare of Yasuní has the same number of native tree species as all of North America); and which is home to almost half of all the birds in the Amazon basin and many similar examples in terms of different varieties of bats, amphibians, reptiles or bees.
Repsol's oil activity in the Yasuní involves periodic oil spills, as Ecologistas en Acción and Acción Ecológica have already denounced. But not only that, an oil field involves the construction of infrastructure (pipelines, roads, heliports), seismic surveys, burning gas in the air, toxic waste pools... in short, the destruction of life. According to the environmental organization, what Repsol is doing in the Ecuadorian reserve is more serious than having an oil field in Spanish national parks, where it would also be unthinkable.
Paradoxically, REPSOL received an award from the EIA (Environmental Investment Organization) for its greenhouse gas emissions reports. Additionally, the company has managed to be included in global and European sustainability indexes for its sustainability performance.
This is why we believe that we should continue to insist on the ITT project, which aims to ensure that part of the oil reserves present in the Yasuní are not exploited in exchange for payment, by the countries and companies of the North, of half of the money that would enter Ecuador if these hydrocarbons were sold. The payment would be in the form of restitution of the ecological debt contracted with Ecuador due to the overuse of hydrocarbons by these countries and the impacts that this entails on life.
2. Oil spills in the coastal strip of the Province of Santa Elena; affecting several communities and hundreds of species of fish and dozens of species of mollusks that are part of the more than a thousand species of vertebrates and invertebrates; commercial and non-commercial identified in this area; occur with relative frequency; without demonstrating effective prevention techniques or contingency plans as demonstrated by the Last spill occurred at Christmas 2010; despite the fact that this year the International Symposium on marine-coastal biodiversity was held in Manta.
2. Mangroves - At the beginning of the year, and after several complaints from mangrove communities and visits made by teams of C-CONDEM ( National Coordinator for the Defense of the Mangrove Ecosystem), it was found that several shrimp farming companies that accepted the regularization proposed by the National Government, reforested areas outside their pools, violating the Decree that explicitly states: in case of felling of mangroves in illegally occupied areas, these must be reforested at their own expense. According to the community members, the argument of the businessmen is that they cannot affect their investments. This situation confronted communities mainly in El Oro, where the associations of shrimp aquaculture companies gave funds to the organizations of shellfish collectors, crab collectors and fishermen to carry out reforestation in places that the organizations determine but outside the pools.
4. Species trafficking: Turtles, monkeys, bears and birds are the most trafficked species in our country. The crime of trafficking of animal and plant species ranks third in Ecuador, after drugs and weapons, according to the Ministry of Natural and Cultural Heritage. However, according to Bella Abata, a fiscal agent of Napo, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, there is "no operational capacity" to detect more and it seems that the resources allocated do not bear the same relationship with the importance of the trafficked species, many of them endangered species.