Protecting Indigenous Lands and Promoting Ethical Conservation Practices Through Design of a Sustainable Environmental Monitoring Network

This project aims to co-create an environmental monitoring network in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, partnering Indigenous communities with an interdisciplinary team to address oil extractive threats, protect biodiversity, and develop sustainable solutions. The environmental monitoring system will be replicated in other sensitive ecosystems across the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth and provides invaluable ecosystem services for its Indigenous and rainforest inhabitants, migratory species, and the global climate. Still, economic pressures have led the Ecuadorian government to expand the extractive oil frontier into the park. Our research indicates that hydrocarbon contamination and poor industrial environmental standards threaten up to 4,500 Indigenous people, including uncontacted tribes, as well as the delicate rainforest ecosystem. This proposal seeks to co-produce a grassroots environmental monitoring network in the Yasuní, bringing the Indigenous communities and local legal experts into partnership with an interdisciplinary university team possessing expertise in political ecology, remote sensing, data science, petroleum engineering, and contaminant remediation. This novel network seeks to situate Indigenous knowledge and conservation efforts not as external to oil extraction and climate science, but as key in devising and implementing sustainable solutions across scales. Building upon our successful ongoing engagement with these partners, the efficacy of this monitoring network will be iteratively tested in full collaboration with Indigenous counterparts and utilized as a critical step in demonstrating the viability of a Rural and Indigenous Monitoring Research Center for the Amazon Region (RIMCAR), to be hosted by the Geography Department at Penn State. This broadly transferrable Center aims to bridge the gap between energy needs, conservation efforts, and climate change policy, elevating Indigenous concerns and supporting on-the-ground conservation efforts, co-producing research that brings marginalized communities into conversation with extractive industries and climate change stakeholders.