Monitoring environnemental, Santé, Société et Pétrole en Equateur

Generally, the image of the pollution, and in particular in the case of oil-drilling, is represented by disasters such as oil spills, occurring during the transport or an operational accident (Itçaina et, Weisbein, 2005, 2011). In Ecuador, the situation is pretty different, as chronic contamination of the Northern Amazon basin has been occurring for 40 years.

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The MONOIL Research Project fully fulfills the 4^th topic of the call 2013 of the French ANR (National Research Agency), which the main guideline of the SOCENV call is: “integrated research for more efficient solutions”. The cross-disciplinary project MONOIL takes part in the scientific description of the human vulnerability to environmental change caused by oil industry activity in Ecuador. MONOIL is funded by the ANR.

The originality of the MONOIL Project resides in its co-construction with public actors in Ecuador: National Secretary of Superior Education, Sciences, Technologies and Innovation (SENESCYT), Public Oil Company Petroecuador and the Ministry for the Environment of Ecuador (MAE) through their program for social and environmental repair (PRAS). It has been developed with 3 universities: Escuela politecnica nacional, Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Universidad San Francisco de Quito). Specific conventions between the IRD and these organisations are signed for the official partnership. A collaborative agreement exists since 7^th of January, 2015.

Another original feature of the project is the choice to develop an ecosystem-based and interdisciplinary approach to respond to the oil contamination concern in a Southern country. The development of adapted tools required for the monitoring can be transfered to other oil-rich regions, especially in low and middle-income countries.

In order to do this, MONOIL proposes an original approach of collective surveys, realised conjointly by sociologists, geographers, economists, geochemists, biologists and modelers, carrying out shared field studies conducted between environmental and social sciences; the implementation of feedback sessions with the local population as well as scientific seminars for industrial and institutional actors are regularly planned during the project.

MONOIL thus aims to strengthen French leadership on the issue of the interactions between societal and environmental change by formalizing interdisciplinary knowledge that may be used in the development and evaluation of environmental policies in the oil sector.

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