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| The area of greatest biodiversity in the world is in process tender to expand the oil frontier |
The slogan “Whoever loves life, protects the forests” is the one used by the website of the Ministry of the Environment of Ecuador in a mix of concepts that coincide with the official slogan of the country brand of “Ecuador loves life.”
Ecuadorian forests cover nearly 9.6 million hectares (ha); of this figure, around 4 million are part of protected areas and the remainder is in private hands or protective forests. 1
However, Ecuador has one of the highest rates of deforestation in Latin America, with an annual loss of between 60,000 and 200,000 hectares of native forests. According to the FAO, Ecuador suffers an annual decrease of 1.81 TP3T of primary forests, the highest rate in Latin America. 2 , although the study claims that it was calculated based on a satellite report from the Center for Integrated Surveys of Natural Resources by Remote Sensors (Clirsen) from 2000, this data was refuted by the government of Ecuador, which states that the loss does not exceed 70 thousand hectares per year. 3
Months ago, the executive director of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), the official body of the 8 American states that share the Amazon region, mentioned that the causes of deforestation were: pressure on land use, expansion of livestock, agriculture, illegal mining, among others, he said. 4 It is worrying that the "among others" area includes large-scale mining and the expansion of the oil frontier, especially considering that the area with the highest rate of deforestation in our country has coincided for several years with the area of greatest oil exploitation in Ecuador, according to the Ministry of the Environment itself. 5
Even more serious are the current plans of the Ecuadorian government to expand the oil frontier to the south-east of the country, through the bidding for new blocks that is currently underway, 6 , which would directly affect a large area of the zone with the GREATEST BIODIVERSITY IN THE WORLD, which it shares with the Yasuní National Park 7 .
Another of the serious problems that is the cause of environmental debt is the issue of forest fires. One of the clearest examples occurred a few days ago in one of the last remnants of tropical dry forest very close to the city of Guayaquil, specifically the one that hit the Cerro Colorado protective forest and destroyed approximately 135 hectares, which revealed an evident lack of coordination between the Ministry of the Environment of Ecuador (MAE), the Municipality of the city and the Secretariat of Risk Management (SNGR) to combat the fire. In addition, the Guayaquil Fire Department (CBG) has few resources in terms of tools to deal with this type of fire. 8
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