Peru leads amazon oil and gas expansion, threatening indigenous communities and protected forests

Peru has emerged as the Amazon’s largest frontier for oil and gas development, with 85 extraction blocks currently in pre-production phases across the rainforest—surpassing both Colombia’s 68 blocks and Brazil’s 53, according to new data from the Stockholm Environment Institute.

The scope of Peru’s fossil fuel ambitions is staggering. The country maintains 173 total oil and gas lease blocks, with 59% located in the Amazon region. These leases blanket 48 million hectares of rainforest—an area larger than California that represents more than one-third of Peru’s entire territory. By comparison, similar lease blocks cover 28 million hectares in Brazil’s Amazon and 18 million hectares in Colombia’s portion of the forest.

The environmental and social impacts are severe. Analysis of the data reveals that 17% of Peru’s Amazon leases overlap with protected areas, including the San Matias-San Carlos Protection Forest and sections of Sierra del Divisor National Park. Even more concerning, over 25% of the leases—covering 12.36 million hectares—overlap with Indigenous territories, directly affecting communities including the Kukama-Kukamiria, Achuar, Kichwa, Quechua, and Urarina peoples.

Mauricio Pinzás Luna, a geographer with Peruvian NGO CooperAcción, warns that fossil fuel extraction in the Amazon carries unacceptable risks. Communities near extraction sites face water contamination, oil spills, deforestation, and new access roads that attract illegal miners and criminals—activities that systematically destroy traditional livelihoods and Indigenous cultures while accelerating environmental degradation in one of Earth’s most critical ecosystems.