Oilwatch Open Letter on the Energy and Biodiversity Initiative (EBI)

Oilwatch Open Letter

To: IUCN, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Flora & Fauna International, Smithsonian Institute.

From: Oilwatch

Re: Energy and Biodiversity Initiative (EBI)

October 2003

The Oilwatch Network and particularly those members with a close knowledge about the companies that are currently participating in the "Energy and Biodiversity Initiative", are extremely concerned about the inclusion in the proposal of some of the oil companies having a worse reputation regarding environmental and human rights issues.

We believe that the proposal to include BP, Chevron­Texaco, Shell and Statoil in the Energy and Biodiversity Initiative, to "produce guidelines, instruments and models with the aim of integrating the biodiversity component to oil and gas extraction", will result in enormous impacts regarding biodiversity conservation, paving the way to environmental impunity and weakening the efforts carried out by local and national organizations to make these companies take full responsibility over the impacts they have already caused.

Amazingly enough, the document resulting from this initiative -titled "Integrating Biodiversity Conservation to Oil and Gas Development"- declares that not only it is possible to reconcile oil related activities with conservation, but also that oil companies "can contribute to better conserve protected areas".

The arguments presented in this document, constitute an opportunity for the oil industry to "clean its corporate image" to "have access to certain resources at the project level, including land, capital and oil concessions".

Will these be the companies that instead of respecting protected areas, will operate within them just because they have a biodiversity policy?

Although the document recognizes that the oil industry results in impacts on biodiversity, it permanently qualifies these as "potential impacts", without acknowledging responsibility over current company operations, including those who subscribe to the initiative.

The document minimizes the direct impacts caused by companies, describing them as "short term impacts" and "restricted to the operational sites" and possible to be solved with technological improvements. Conversely, it amplifies the so called "indirect impacts", that this document sustains are caused by "local poor populations", about which, they claim, it is quite difficult to determine "responsibilities".

This report claims that it is not only possible to carry out oil activities with minimal impact on biodiversity, but that oil operations can help to improve the conservation of biological diversity. How?: "restricting the entrance to third parties to these areas"; "helping the poor"; "providing financial aid to state agencies in charge of conservation"; "participating in the elaboration of biodiversity policies".

Those types of measures, already put in practice before by companies, not only contribute nothing to conservation, but, on the contrary, have weakened environmental and conservation legislations, making the verification of the impacts of those companies an impossible task because access to their operation sites is closed, and their intervention in policy and legislation constitute abuses to national sovereignty.

The initiative does not propose any strong conservation measures, but only a series of generalities already put forward by companies, such as the use of "standards" and "high tech" which are then not applied, are not mandatory and have no relation whatsoever with the real environmental behaviour of companies. No commitment is made in relation to protected areas or biodiversity. On contrary, it declares that double standards constitute an inevitable practice, because it constantly states that every company is different, as is every country and that therefore "their behaviour will depend on different conditions".

This initiative weakens the efforts to guarantee the conservation of protected areas, to move towards an energy transition and to achieve a moratorium on the expansion of the oil frontier, because it gives a license to deception and impunity, allowing to clean the image of oil companies and to accept destructive operations within areas designated to conservation.

How is it possible to sit at the same table with companies that have a proven history of social and environmental impacts, and even worse, with Chevron­Texaco, which is currently being prosecuted in Ecuador for its environmental crimes? Is it that IUCN, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Flora & Fauna International and the Smithsonian Institute have decided to grant a good behaviour certificate to these companies? They should make this issue clear, in order to maintain their own image.