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Oil and gas development in the World Heritage and wider protected area network in sub-Saharan Africa

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Abstract

More than 25% of natural World Heritage (WH) sites worldwide are estimated to be under pressure from existing or future mining and energy activities (IUCN 2008; UNESCO 2009). However, that ‘pressure’ has yet to be quantitatively defined and assessed for many regions of the world. We conducted a GIS-based analysis of overlap and proximity between natural WH sites and areas allocated to oil and gas concessions as well as pipelines and oil wells for all of sub-Saharan Africa. We found that oil and gas concessions were located within 27% of the WH sites, though no currently active oil wells were operating directly within the WH sites. A proximity-based assessment of oil and gas concessions within 5 km of WH site boundaries included only one additional WH site, suggesting that sites susceptible to indirect impacts from oil and gas development are likely to be those already overlapped by concessions. Our findings indicate that activity from oil and gas development in sub-Saharan WH sites has to date been limited; however, future pressure cannot be ruled out, due to continued presence of concessions within more than one quarter of the network, and projected expansion of oil and gas exploration within the region. Our results may be used to inform the inclusion of new sites into the WH network.

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Acknowledgments

We thank The Oxford Martin School and Oriel College, Oxford (Sir Walter Raleigh Scholarship scheme), for funding this work, and IHS for the provision of GIS datasets on oil and gas concessions and infrastructure. We are also grateful to Igor Lysenko for help with processing the IHS data, John Taylor for his advice on indirect impact buffer sizes, Jörn Scharlemann, Charles Besançon, Kate Abernethy and James Gilbert for insight on analysis methods, and Neil Burgess for providing advice on the Eastern Arc Mountains Forests of Tanzania.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK

    Matea Osti, Lauren Coad & Joshua B. Fisher

  2. United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, 219 Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, CB3 0DL, UK

    Matea Osti, Lauren Coad, Bastian Bomhard & Jonathan M. Hutton

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  1. Matea Osti
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  2. Lauren Coad
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  3. Joshua B. Fisher
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  4. Bastian Bomhard
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Correspondence to Matea Osti.

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Osti, M., Coad, L., Fisher, J.B. et al. Oil and gas development in the World Heritage and wider protected area network in sub-Saharan Africa. Biodivers Conserv 20, 1863–1877 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-011-0056-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-011-0056-6

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