Oil Exploitation in Yasuni Biosphere Reserve. Impact on Ecuador’s Commitment with Sustainability

The purpose of this research is to identify how oil exploitation inside the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, affects the Ecuadorian government’s commitment to its sustainable development. The research is based on the bibliographic review of the reserve’s management plans, legislation regarding environmental protection and land management; as well as previous works on documenting key factors and their impacts in the reserve, focusing on oil exploitation. For this analysis, Yasuni has been considered as a complex system, in which key factors determine changes in four dimensions and their interactions, defined to represent sustainable development: social, environmental, political and economical. In the proposed analysis, components and actors are identified for each dimension, and their relationship is described at the different scale of their impact. By understanding these roles and their significance, it is determined which dimension is the most influential, therefore establishing if it supports sustainable development or not. In Yasuni, it is clearly established that the economical and political dimensions determine the future of the reserve, which is considered highly unsustainable and depicts an important dependence of the country and Yasuni on oil extraction in order to get financial resources. The identification of key factors and actors however, brings the possibility of promoting a more egalitarian distribution of power among these, in decision making, enabling a path towards sustainability and engaging the Ecuadorian government with it.