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Presentation of the research programm "Monitoring of Oil activities in Ecuador : a cross-disciplinary approach between Environment, Health and People"

For over forty years, environmental contamination has been occasional, accidental or continuous, and has been distributed over a large part of the Ecuadorian Amazon basin, mainly in the North. The main sources of pollutants have been due to the release of liquid hydrocarbons and formation waters into the soil, surface water and groundwater as well as gaseous emissions into the atmosphere by gas flares. Effects on the environment depend on the different phases of exploration and exploitation operations, from seismic surveys, drilling, production, and transportation to the refinery. The process of oil exploitation generates highly toxic waste (sludge and liquid) that can be temporarily stored in pits, which may (or may not) be sealed, followed by burning or reinjection into perforated zones underground or directly discharged into the ground or surface waters before the implementation of a new legislation. In particular, the production process generates “formation water” which contains high quantities of salts, heavy metals and “emulsified” petroleum. Finally, another form of waste generated by the production is natural gas, burned continually in the open air in gas flares. To this "routinely contamination" (Maldonado and Narvaez, 2005), one can add pipe break or malfunctioning oil wells. Thus, due to the extraction of oil, Ecuador is estimated to suffer thirty times the ecological catastrophe caused by Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1986.

The Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 considers the protection of the environment and the natural and cultural heritage as a fundamental State responsibility (Article 3), in order to safeguard the rights of citizens to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment (Article 86); it also underlines the commitment of the State to intervene immediately to ensure the human health and/or to repair the damages caused to the people and the environment thanks to the adoption of measuring devices to prevent the contamination, to restore and sustainably manage the ecosystems and to repair and to reduce or compensate the social harm and health damage (Article 397). Finally, the State recognizes that non-renewable natural resources belong to the inalienable State assets and that their management and extraction must take place according to a sustainable model of development (Article 317).

The main objective of the MONOIL Project is an improvement in understanding, monitoring, reducing and preventing oil contamination and its impact on environment and society. This involves either the co-construction of strategies to reduce this vulnerability, or the construction of ecologically sustainable, economically viable, sociologically appropriate and politically pertinent adaptation strategies.

The specific objectives of MONOIL are:

1. to identify and map oil-rich areas according to the vulnerability/population’s capacity to deal with environmental contamination;

2. to measure the impact of chemical cocktails consisting of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals associated with water-based petroleum activities in waters (rainfall, surface water and groundwater), soils and in the food chain (fish, mollusks, agricultural products);

3. to understand the constraints and levers that affect the implementation of environmental regulations that are supposed to regulate petroleum activities;

4. to study links between environmental contamination risks and health from a human scale (socio-epidemiology) to the cellular level (molecular biology, cytotoxicity)

5. to test an innovative system for depolluting drinking water.

The cross-disciplinary and ecosystem-focused approaches bring together researchers from sociology, economics, geography, epidemiology, hydrology, geochemistry, toxicology, biology as well as the operational actors involved in Ecuador. This methodology will enable the attainment of the scientific objectives of the project and will also ensure an operational transfer. Thanks to this transfer, the project will contribute most significantly to the implementation of a public policy with more inclusive considerations for public health, environment and sustainable development.

The agreement-granting subsidy (n°ANR-13-SENV-0003-01) signed between the applicants and the ANR (French National Research Agency) designated the IRD as the coordinator of the MONOIL Project.