This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The uneven distribution of oil extraction's impacts and benefits helps explain why some Indigenous communities accept it, newly published research shows. The work is published in the journal Geoforum.
Julie Dayot spent eight months with Quichua communities along the Lower Napo River in the Ecuadorian Amazon during the expansion of a major oil project. Dayot found many communities accept new extraction—despite anticipating ecological damage and impacts on their livelihoods. The research shows that their decisions cannot be viewed in isolation.
Instead, environmental damage extends beyond individual oil projects. River pollution, for instance, can reach communities downstream long before oil extraction enters their own territories. However, the benefits offered by oil companies come only to communities where oil projects take place.
That means the impacts come before, and potentially without, the benefits intended to offset them, from the point of view of a specific community. "When I first met people from Quichua communities, I was surprised that many wanted the oil company to come," said Dayot, who began the research during a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford and is now at the University of Exeter. "I wanted to understand why.
Over time, I saw how the costs and benefits of oil extraction are spread unevenly over space and time. "One particularly striking example is drinking water. The river that communities depend on was already widely polluted, partly due to earlier oil extraction upstream.
"Several communities therefore asked the oil company for drinking water systems—both to address an existing problem and because they expected the new extraction to further contaminate the river." Dayot said this is how oil comes to be seen locally as both a source of environmental harm and a means of addressing some of its expected impacts, as well as existing problems. More than half of the Ecuadorian Amazon has been marked for oil drilling. The research took place in Quichua communities along the Lower Napo River, including six communities whose territories overlap with the Ishpingo–Tambococha–Tiputini (ITT) oil project.
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