Colombia banned all new oil and mining across 480,000 square kilometers of Amazon, an area the size of Sweden. One decision killed 43 oil blocks and 286 mining applications. The uncomfortable part is which countries didn't follow.
Colombia controls 7% of the Amazon. Brazil controls nearly 60%, and over the same stretch it auctioned oil blocks near Indigenous lands and approved offshore drilling at the mouth of the Amazon river itself. Peru is courting foreign oil companies to restart Lot 192, a massive crude site in its northern rainforest.
Zoom out and the map gets worse. There are 871 oil and gas blocks across the Amazon basin, covering an area roughly twice the size of France. 68% of them haven't produced a barrel yet. They're still in study or bidding phases. Those pending blocks are the real battlefield, and Colombia's ban touches a sliver of them.
There's also a reason Colombia could move first. Its oil industry lives in the Llanos and Magdalena basins, outside the rainforest. The 43 cancelled blocks had never broken ground, and existing Amazon operations keep running because the ban only covers new licenses. Colombia traded future option value, almost no current revenue.
Which makes the precedent the whole story. The country that owns 7% of the Amazon protected all of it. The country that owns 60% approved drilling at the river's mouth.
The forest's fate sits in that 68%. The next five years of licensing decisions matter more than the last fifty years of drilling.
Night Sky Today (@NightSkyToday)
JUST IN🚨: Colombia bans all new oil and mining in its Amazon rain-forest. The protected area is the size of Sweden and covers 42% of the country.
— https://nitter.net/NightSkyToday/status/2081512638253506981#m