In Ecuador’s Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, toxic oil-production waters are threatening one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. Its rivers, flooded forests, wildlife and Indigenous communities are at risk.
Cuyabeno is part of the upper Amazon basin, a vital living system whose protection extends far beyond Ecuador. This environmental emergency demands attention and action.
The future is not something that merely happens to us. It is also something we leave behind. And what we leave behind depends upon what we choose to protect today.
“Cuyabeno: What We Choose to Protect”
A WOUNDED AMAZON.
A DESTABILISED WORLD.
AND NOW, EL NIÑO.
Only a few weeks ago, we wrote that El Niño was approaching a wounded Amazon.
Those wounds were not inflicted by climate alone. Many were the consequence of choices: forests exchanged for short-term extraction, rivers exposed to oil and mining, environmental protections weakened in the name of economic urgency.
Behind these wounds lies another story, now unfolding across Latin America: extractive authoritarianism.
It begins when the urgency to take more—oil from beneath the forest, minerals from the mountains, timber from what remains standing—ceases to tolerate the boundaries placed around it. Environmental protections, Indigenous and local communities, independent courts, civil society, journalists and democratic scrutiny all occupy, in different ways, that inconvenient ground between what can be extracted and what should be allowed.
And across Latin America today, those boundaries are being moved. Some are being erased.
What begins as an argument about extracting Nature's wealth thus reaches much further. Environmental protections are dismantled, institutions subordinated and democratic restraints recast as obstacles to economic progress.
The forest and democracy discover that they are standing in the path of the same imperative.
That was part of the world we described in El Niño Finds a Wounded Amazon.
Now the horizon has widened dramatically.
The World Meteorological Organization says El Niño is firmly established and strengthening towards a very strong event. There is a nearly 100 per cent probability that it will persist through February 2027. Its latest seasonal forecast projects an average temperature anomaly of approximately 3.6°C in the central tropical Pacific for September to November, with intensification expected towards the end of the year.
The Guardian, reporting the latest UN assessment, describes something more extraordinary still. Ocean temperatures at the heart of El Niño are already around 2.6°C above the 30-year average, while an average of 14 forecasting models points towards approximately 4°C by November. Evidence reconstructed from corals, tree rings and historical records raises the possibility that an El Niño of such magnitude has not occurred for at least a thousand years.
But perhaps the most disturbing fact is not El Niño alone.
It is the world into which it is arriving.
Across continents, climate change has already altered the background against which this natural phenomenon will unfold. Europe has endured exceptional heat. Wildfires are worsening in Indonesia and the danger is expected to increase in Australia. India's vital monsoon rains are weakening. Parts of South America face the prospect of more intense flooding. The World Food Programme estimates that El Niño could push around 50 million people into acute hunger.
The geography changes. The warning does not. A vast natural climate cycle is releasing its pulse of heat into oceans and an atmosphere already warmed by human activity.
El Niño has crossed the Pacific for thousands of years. It has never entered the world quite like the one waiting for it now.
And somewhere beneath that planetary story lies the Amazon.
When SELVA published El Niño Finds a Wounded Amazon, we asked what would happen when a powerful El Niño encountered a rainforest already weakened by extraction, fire, pollution and political choices.
The latest UN assessment forces us to enlarge the question.
What happens when an exceptional El Niño encounters not only a wounded Amazon, but a climate system already pushed beyond the conditions in which human societies learned to prosper?
Perhaps this is the connection we have been slowest to understand.
The rainforest is not somewhere else.
Neither is the climate.
READ MORE
The international warning:
The Guardian — “Supersizing before our eyes”: UN warns of record El Niño approaching
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/03/el-nino-supersizing-before-our-eyes-united-nations
The scientific assessment:
World Meteorological Organization — El Niño set to become very strong, raising risks of extreme weather into 2027
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/el-nino-set-become-very-strong-raising-risks-of-extreme-weather-2027
Our earlier analysis:
SELVA — El Niño Finds a Wounded Amazon
https://www.iamselva.org/post/el-ni%C3%B1o-finds-a-wounded-amazon
El NIÑO FINDS A WOUNDED AMAZON
A powerful El Niño is approaching. It will not encounter the Amazon as it once was, but a rainforest weakened by fire, roads, oil extraction, mining and repeated failures of environmental protection.
This matters far beyond the forest. The Amazon helps cool the planet, generate rain and regulate the climate across an entire continent. As its resilience is diminished, drought and extreme heat can reach far beyond its borders.
The article is grounded in the continuing work of SELVA–Vida Sin Fronteras: defending the Cuyabeno Fauna Reserve, opposing the proposed toxic-waste operation at Aguarico 3, protecting the Amazon Reserves for Peace, restoring degraded rainforest and providing medical support to remote communities.
This work demonstrates that the Amazon’s wounds are neither abstract nor inevitable—and that credible alternatives already exist.
El Niño is coming. The condition in which it finds the Amazon is still, in part, a human choice.
Ecuador begins hydraulic fracturing in the Amazon rainforest.
Kate Hairsine with AFP, EFE
04/30/2026April 30, 2026
Ecuador is pushing to increase its production of crude oil but faces a backlash from environmentalists and Indigenous groups.
Ecuador has started fracking in the Amazon rainforest for the first time, state oil company Petroecuador said Wednesday.
The new hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, project is in the Amazonian province of Sucumbios on Ecuador's border with Colombia.
The fracking at a new well on Block 57 - Shushufindi Libertador represents "milestone " for oil production in the country, the Ministry of Environment and Energy said in a statement released on Wednesday.
The new well is in full production, producing more than 930 barrels a day, the ministry of said.
The project is being jointly conducted with a subsidiary of China's national petroleum corporation, CCDC.
What is fracking?
Fracking entails extracting natural gas and petroleum from subterranean bedrock.
It is criticized for using industrial quantities of water to break open rocks as well as causing chemical contamination and provoking micro-earthquakes.
Ecuador pushing to ramp up oil production
Ecuador's crude oil production fell to around 466,000 barrels a day in January 2026, a 13% drop from the same period a decade earlier. Analysts point to aging infrastructure and years of underinvestment as part of the problem.
Oil revenues make up a significant amount of Ecuador's export earnings.
The government of President Daniel Noboa has promised more funds for oil exploration and infrastructure and to attract greater foreign oil investments.
At the same time, his government's push to expand oil exploration, particularly in the Amazon, has alarmed environmentalists and Indigenous leaders.
Edited By:
Zac Crellin
kate Hairsine Report and Senior editor
De: feedback.english@dw.com
Deate: 3 de agosto de 2026 a las 8:49:00 a. m. ECT
For: mariana@iamselva.org
:Subject: Ecuador starts fracking in Amazon rainforest
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Editorial
By:
A Hummingbird Named Vida
Petroecuador has just announced a historic shift in Ecuador's petroleum policy. In partnership with CCDC, a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Corporation, the State carried out its first hydraulic fracturing operation in Block 57, Shushufindi-Libertador, targeting the Caliza A geological formation in Sucumbíos Province. More significantly, Petroecuador declared that the operation had opened "a new horizon" for expanding this technology to other Ecuadorian oilfields.
This announcement marks far more than the introduction of a new extraction technique. It signals Ecuador's entry into a new era of oil development in which underground rock formations are deliberately fractured to access reserves that conventional production could not economically exploit. Such a decision deserves the broadest public debate, particularly when it concerns one of the world's most biologically important rainforest ecosystems.
The timing is deeply troubling. While the Noboa Government celebrates a new frontier in petroleum extraction, it has yet to demonstrate that it can effectively manage the environmental consequences of the oil infrastructure already operating in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The continuing produced-water disaster in the Cuyabeno remains unresolved months after it began. If the State has been unable to contain a major environmental emergency using existing technology, why should Ecuadorians—or the international community—be expected to place their confidence in a far more technically demanding form of oil extraction?
This is therefore not simply a debate about hydraulic fracturing. It is a question of governance, scientific transparency and public trust. Before opening a new chapter in Amazonian oil exploitation, the Government must first demonstrate that it can responsibly manage the one it already has.
Long before Ecuador became a republic, before the first maps gave names to its rivers, the Amazon had already perfected the quiet rhythm of life. For thousands of years, forests rose and fell, rivers changed their course, and countless generations of plants, animals and Indigenous peoples sustained an unbroken continuity that no government could create and no generation has the right to squander.
Every generation inherits that living legacy for only a brief moment before passing it on. Whether the Noboa Government will be remembered as the administration that opened a new era of increasingly invasive oil extraction—or as the one that recognised that some places possess a value beyond the resources beneath them—is a decision that history has not yet written.
Illegal Gold Mining in Yasuní: A Constitutional Test for Ecuador
Yasuní National Park is internationally recognised as one of the most biologically diverse rainforest ecosystems on Earth. In 1989, Ecuador voluntarily sought and obtained UNESCO's designation of Yasuní as a Biosphere Reserve through the intergovernmental procedures of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme. By doing so, the Ecuadorian State accepted the international responsibility of conserving and managing Yasuní in accordance with the principles and objectives governing the World Network of Biosphere Reserves.
Those principles and objectives are directed towards the conservation of biodiversity, the maintenance of ecological integrity, scientific research and environmentally sustainable development. Industrial extractive activities that undermine the ecological values for which a Biosphere Reserve has been internationally recognised are inconsistent with, and contradict, the principles and objectives governing UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme.
Ecuador's international commitments are reinforced by its own Constitution, which recognises the Rights of Nature and imposes upon the State a constitutional duty to protect the nation's protected areas and biological heritage.
On 20 August 2023, the Ecuadorian people exercised their sovereign constitutional authority by approving a binding national referendum requiring the cessation of oil extraction in Block 43 (ITT) within Yasuní National Park. A binding referendum is not a political recommendation. It creates a constitutional obligation upon the Government to implement the sovereign will of the Ecuadorian people.
Yet, as of 28 July 2026, the available evidence indicates that approximately 55,000 to 57,000 barrels of crude oil continue to be extracted every day from Block 43—more than 20 million barrels each year—from the very oil field that the Ecuadorian people voted to leave permanently underground.
These facts demonstrate that the constitutional mandate expressed through the 2023 referendum has not yet been fully implemented. The continuing large-scale extraction of oil from Block 43 therefore constitutes compelling evidence that the sovereign will expressed by the Ecuadorian people has yet to be fully carried into effect.
Recent investigative reports broadcast by Ecuador's national television network, Ecuavisa (Channel 8) present further evidence of illegal gold mining within Yasuní National Park.
Taken together, the continued extraction of oil and the expansion of illegal gold mining reveal two converging threats to one of the world's greatest rainforest ecosystems.
They also raise profound constitutional and international questions concerning the responsibilities entrusted to the Government of President Daniel Noboa.
As Head of Government, President Daniel Noboa bears the constitutional responsibility for ensuring that Ecuador's Constitution is respected, that the democratic mandate expressed in the 2023 referendum is implemented, and that Ecuador fulfils the international conservation commitments it voluntarily accepted when Yasuní was recognised by UNESCO as a Biosphere Reserve.
These matters deserve urgent national attention and, if necessary, constitutional review. The protection of Yasuní is not merely an environmental issue. It is a constitutional obligation owed to the Ecuadorian people and an international responsibility owed to humanity.
For more than two years, the Ecuadorian people have been waiting for the promise they made to themselves to become reality.
Yet every sunrise still carries tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil out of Yasuní, while new reports reveal that gold is now leaving the same forest through another open wound.
Constitutions can be ignored. Referendums can be delayed. International commitments can be neglected. But the rainforest keeps its own calendar. Every day that passes, another fragment of one of Earth's greatest living forests disappears into history.
One day the last barrel of oil will leave Yasuní.
When that day arrives, may there still remain a Yasuní worthy of the name that inspired Ecuador to seek its recognition as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve—and worthy of the promise its own people made to protect it forever.
For further information please open the following two investigative reports by Ecuavisa:
Illegal mining advances in Yasuní and reaches the intangible zone | Televistazo Special | Ecuavisa
Illegal mining advances in the Curaray River and threatens Yasuní | Televistazo Special | Ecuavisa