KAROO NEWS - "For quite some time, global natural gas production is growing only slowly. The easy targets in the Middle East have all reached their climax – and now gas companies have to look for more difficult locations, like the Karoo. At least it looks nice in their books to have the vast shale gas resources “ready for production”, but for what cost?
A few years ago - readers of the Advertiser will remember - I was touring the Karoo with a presentation entitled: “Six Reasons Why the Karoo Will Never Be Fracked” (bit.ly/2JpXAav). These reasons have been found to be true in the meantime.
Little did I know then that fracking would not leave me, or that I would stay with the issue. Fast- forward to April 2019 and I found myself sitting in the Bolivian jungle with angry local farmers who are blocking a road into invaluable rain forest areas.
They know quite well that this jungle is their local weather machine. Here, the clouds are made that generate the rainfall across the province of Tarija. The young women and men want to make sure to have a future in agriculture. For this, they must protect the Reserva Nacional de Flora y Fauna de Tariquía (bit.ly/2InZfOB).
And they do that with bodies, in harsh weather, hot in summer, cold in winter, and always with high humidity and mosquitos.
But they fear more the international oil and gas companies, and their “friends” from the Bolivian police. Once, police had broken through the roadblocks, but had to withdraw as crucial national elections loom in October 2019.
The Government of Bolivian president Evo Morales pretends internationally to be the ultimate protector of Pachamama, Mother Earth in Quechua – a native South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes. When he became President of the country in 2006, he instituted sweeping changes, giving Indigenous people of Bolivia far-reaching rights, large areas of semi-autonomous self-governance and large areas of protected settlement terrains.
But then, in 2013, he passed a Presidential Decree, which allowed oil and gas exploration in all of these areas, including in most national parks.
Luckily, the local university in Tarija wants to come to the party and do its bit to protect these valuable national and international assets.
Deep in the Bolivian jungle, farmers are blocking the access for gas exploration to the rain forest.
In the absence of any hard data, the environmental impact of gas exploration, now planned and granted for the very heart of the Reserva, cannot be modelled with any sense of certainty. But we have an example to work with: The Strategic Environmental Assessment on Shale Gas in the Karoo (bit.ly/2FRni6X), a rigorous two-year research process undertaken a few years ago by the South African government. Its logical conclusion: even after such a meticulous and expansive activity, the unknown prevails.
There is not enough data to safely be able to allow such a disruptive technology to go ahead in an area of critical ecological importance.
The same applies now in Bolivia. The South Africa process there serves as a blueprint to establish laborious scientific investigations. Bolivian researchers look forward to learning from the Karoo. It is a privilege for this author to replicate work from the Karoo now with Bolivian colleagues to make sure that their home is protected."
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