My original thoughts for this project began in late 2016 as I was staying in Peru and kept reading in the news about repeated large oil spills from pipelines and drilling infrastructure in the northern Peruvian Amazon, which were (and still are) contaminating the water, air and food sources of nearby and downstream indigenous and other riverside communities. In one stretch of the main pipeline carrying Amazon oil to the Pacific ocean, there were 7 major spills between August and November 2016 alone.
I could see a need for easy-to-use tools for indigenous community members and their supporting local NGOs to collect geolocated environmental data that can be shared with other communities, and used to gain public support and advocate to government authorities for resolution of the environmental issues.
From information I gathered from various news articles, I developed a simple preliminary version of a web map showing the locations of the 2016 spills and their proximity to indigenous communities and other sensitive areas. In late 2017, I started working with the NGO Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Law, Environment and Natural Resources), or DAR, in the northern Amazonian city of Iquitos, and subsequently developed these project ideas into the current web map, which has been incorporated into DAR’s website on Amazon infrastructure, called “InfrAmazonía“.
The oil spills GIS project developed from 2017 through 2021 was embedded into and linked from the “Interactive Map of Oil Spills” web page of the InfrAmazonía website. This project utilizes data published separately by many different Peruvian government agencies (including data that was not published before 2018), but makes the data more understandable and easier to navigate. Integrating the data into a single interactive map that more clearly shows the overall historical and spatial distribution of the oil spills and potential impacts on people, natural resources and protected areas than do other maps available from those government agencies or third-party organizations.
In March 2019, the national indigenous association AIDESEP released a new “Early Warning System” portal, including an interactive map viewer and a mobile application to be used by indigenous community members to collect and publish information on environmental threats and impacts. Along with DAR, I worked with AIDESEP to share data and knowledge that could benefit the efforts of both organizations, and ultimately the people and places affected by the contamination.
The data displayed in the interactive map was updated as new data became available from the Peruvian government, but unfortunately the government agency in charge of monitoring spills (OEFA) stopped updating its published data in late 2019, then stopped publicly sharing the data through its web portal entirely a couple of years later.
I also searched for geospatial data on oil spills across the border in the Amazon of Ecuador, but no data has been publicly published by the Ecuadorean government. The best data I found is from a French study called MONOIL, which ended in 2015.
After I started working with the NGO E-Tech International in early 2021, I incorporated more recent spills data from OEFA obtained through special data transparency requests from DAR and from researchers working with the Peruvian National Human Rights Coordinator under a grant from Oxfam. Shortly after making her data request, my collaborator at DAR left the organization in early 2022 and no further progress was then made with the InfrAmazonía website.
I continued updating and enhancing the GIS project, and through my collaboration with E-Tech I gained access to spills data that had by then been collected by indigenous community members of the PUINAMUDT alliance of indigenous federations in the four watersheds most seriously affected by the contamination. This data, along with the more recent data from OEFA, was embedded into and linked from the “History and Geography of Oil Spills in the Peruvian Amazon” (English & Español) web page of the redesigned E-Tech website launched in early 2024.
