Sale covering 56,000 square miles to go ahead despite opposition Indigenous and environmental groups
The Brazilian government is preparing to stage an oil exploration auction months before it hosts the Cop30 UN climate summit, despite opposition from environmental campaigners and Indigenous communities worried about the environmental and climate impacts of the plans. Brazil’s oil sector regulator, ANP, will auction the exploration rights to 172 oil and gas blocks spanning 56,000 square miles (146,000 sq km), an area more than twice the size of Scotland, most of it offshore. The “doomsday auction”, as campaigners have called it, includes 47 blocks in the Amazon basin, in a sensitive area near the mouth of the river that fossil fuel companies consider a promising new oil frontier. The auction is key to Brazil’s plans to become the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, an ambition supported by the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who argues that oil revenue will bring economic development and fund the energy transition. But a wide range of groups, including environmentalists, federal prosecutors and even oil workers’ unions, are pushing for the bidding round to be called off, citing inadequate environmental assessment studies, the violation of Indigenous rights and the incompatibility of increased oil production with Brazil’s climate commitments.
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