US-backed oil exploration bringing global forests to 'point of no return,' activists say

As an unprecedented forest summit opens in Africa, a global movement of indigenous activists is pushing to halt all industrial and oil exploration in the world’s principal forests — an expansion largely funded by the U.S. and other Western countries.

Campaigners in countries from Peru to Indonesia argue oil exploration is a threat to the world's climate, both through drilling itself and the deforestation it causes — a threat, they say, that is going unaddressed.

"We must act together and with determination to preserve the 350 million hectares of tropical forests,” Republic of Congo President Denis Sassou Nguesso said in a welcome statement opening the Three Basins Summit, which began Thursday in Brazzaville. 

The summit unites politicians from the world’s leading forest nations  — including Peru, Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — with representatives of environmental nonprofits in an effort to create “a global alliance of ecosystems.”

The three basins referenced in the conference's name are South America’s Amazon Basin, Central Africa’s Congo Basin and the Borneo-Mekong Basin that spans peninsular and island Southeast Asia.

The problems facing global forests are stark, despite years of international agreements intended to stop them. In 2022, 4.1 million hectares of forest — an area a bit bigger than Maryland — were cut down worldwide.

More than 96 percent of the land cleared last year was in tropical forests — whose incredible biodiversity also translates to vast emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide when they are cleared, as well as the loss of landscapes that would naturally pull greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. 

Activists from a coalition of indigenous and environmental groups argued that a key element of the problems had been left off the summit's agenda: a campaign of oil and gas drilling that had left ecosystems like the Amazon forest moving toward “the point of no return,” said Fany Kuiru Castro, who heads COICA, a union of 512 indigenous people in “the Great Basin” of the Amazon. 

Activists from the coalition argued Thursday that the governments of the countries represented at the conference are promoting destructive oil and mining exploration in the same forests they are meeting to save — making it a “‘two-faced summit,” according to Rainforest Foundation UK.

As these governments meet to discuss how carbon and biodiversity markets can help create financial incentives for forest protection, the campaigners argued, they are opening the world's tropical forest up to a familiar threat: industrial exploitation, much of it financed by the very countries with the loudest positions on tropical forest protection.

Despite statements from the U.S. and Europe about the importance of protecting these forests, U.S. firms and the U.S. government are continuing to back oil development there. 

More than two-thirds of the oil and gas pulled from the Amazon makes its way to the United States — and 66 percent of that goes to California.

A majority of the investment into the expanding oil and gas industry in the Amazon also comes from six U.S.-based banks and their subsidiaries, according to a July report by environmental research group Stand.earth.

In May, the U.S. government’s Export-Import approved a $100 million loan to Indonesia — the biggest country in the Borneo-Mekong basin — to expand a massive oil refinery on the island of Borneo, the site of both dense forest and rapid deforestation.

In September, the Democratic Republic of Congo announced it had awarded gas exploration blocks in the Congo basin to two U.S.-based firms.

And this may only be the beginning.

According to a report released Tuesday by nonprofit Earth Insight, oil and gas concessions now cover nearly a fifth of the three basins’ surviving tropical forests — or, in the case of the Amazon and Congo Basins, nearly a quarter. 

Those concessions, the report argues, threaten the lives and livelihood of more than 200 million people, as well as rich — and carbon-dense — natural landscapes. 

Carbon dioxide is released by the burning of living things like trees or by the residues of once-living things like oil, coal and gas, contributing to climate change. 

This petroleum push comes as international organizations increasingly urge a full stop to fossil fuel exploration due to the threat it poses to the global climate.

New oil drilling in general represents such a risk. In 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA), a leading global energy watchdog, said new drilling must halt to keep the planet from devastating levels of heating — a warning that largely went ignored by oil companies and national governments. The IEA this year softened that warning to an advisory against "long-lead-time" drilling projects.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called on world leaders in June to target the “polluted heart of the climate crisis: the fossil fuel industry” if they are to avert levels of global heating that reach 2.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times — or nearly three times the amount that has already occurred.

And in September, he offered pointed criticism of national governments for the $7 trillion in subsidies they give to the oil and gas industry to produce fuels that are destabilizing the climate.

But campaigners from the coalition of indigenous and environmental groups noted that even clean energy can put tropical landscapes at risk. The growing electric vehicle (EV) industry is another source of concern. In Indonesia — which seeks to exploit its massive nickel reserves to meet growing global demand for EVs — more than half of the country’s forests overlap with potential mine sites.

Added to the risk of oil emissions is the additional climate risk posed by the deforestation that is carried out directly for oil and gas drilling and is enabled by those activities — as illegal timber cutters, gold miners and land colonists spread along the fishbone of petroleum exploitation roads.

Thanks to these forces, the Amazon — once a great “sink,” or consumer, of global carbon emissions — is losing the ability to store carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas warming the planet, Paulo Artaxo, a professor of environmental physics at the University of São Paulo, told reporters Tuesday.

If current trends of mining, logging and oil drilling hold, the Amazon will soon begin to release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, Artaxo added. 

In an emotional appeal to journalists on Tuesday, indigenous leader Kuiru Castro recalled the depredations of the early 20th-century industrial rubber boom, which killed an estimated 100,000 indigenous Amazonians, and reduced once-prosperous peoples to penury. 

“Today that continues in very grave form with fossil fuels,” she said. “The deforestation has to stop. The degradation has to stop. The exploitation of fossil fuels has to stop,” she said.

As a bright spot, she noted the left-leaning government of Colombia — a country with substantial oil reserves and Amazon holdings — joined the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance in April, something she called an example of “positive leadership” in the region.

The Amazon, she said, “isn’t just a place on the planet — it is a great maloca” — the traditional longhouse and sacred space of Amazonian peoples. 

“Our obligation to defend it isn’t just about resistance — it is an act of great love for life, and also for the generations that are coming after,” she said.