The health of a quarter of people living on Earth is put at risk by the proximity of fossil fuel plants.
At least 2 billion people, about a quarter of the global population, live within 5 km of more than 18,000 fossil fuel infrastructures spread across 170 countries. Of these, over 520 million are children, and at least 463 million live within just one kilometer of these sites.
An Amnesty International report published the day after the start of COP30 elaborates for the first time an estimate of the number of earthlings whose health is seriously threatened by geographical proximity to oil, coal and gas extraction, processing or transport facilities. The result is a map of the global damage inflicted by fossil fuels not only when we breathe in their emissions, or suffer the effects of global warming they cause – but Beforewhen we extract them from underground and ship them from one end of the Earth to the other.
The human costs of fossil fuels
Most studies on the impact of fossil fuels focus on their contribution to smog or their climate-altering power, which increases global warming to the detriment of our health.
The new report, entitled Extraction Extinction: Why the Lifecycle of Fossil Fuels Threatens Life, Nature, and Human Rights (“Extinction Extraction: Why the Life Cycle of Fossil Fuels Threatens Life, Nature and Human Rights”), conducted by Amnesty International in collaboration with the Better Planet Laboratory (BPL) at the University of Colorado Boulder, performs a different exercise, reconstructing the geography of people’s direct exposure to fossil infrastructure.
The scientists combined data on the known locations of wells, pipelines and other fossil industry facilities with data on the population and the presence of ecosystems crucial for biodiversity or carbon sequestration, as well as data on daily greenhouse gas emissions and the disposition of indigenous populations in the territory.
They thus discovered that over 16% of fossil fuel infrastructure resides in indigenous territories, and that at least 32% of existing facilities for extracting, processing or transporting oil & co. it sits above a critical ecosystem, the degradation of which would lead to cascading ecosystem damage.
“Expendable” areas
Most of the mapped projects have transformed nearby ecosystems and communities into highly contaminated areas, with worrying levels of pollution caused by accidental spills, blazes, columns of smoke, damage to local biodiversity and to systems, such as forests and swamps, which should serve as carbon sinks, but which no longer perform this function because they are too degraded.
Proximity to fossil fuel infrastructures (mines and carbon extraction and processing plants, gas pipelines, oil pipelines, regasifiers, drilling plants, refineries) increases the risk of cancer, respiratory and cardiac diseases, premature births; it represents a threat to the quality of air and water and a factor of degradation for the territory.
Those who pay the price are almost always a marginalized population, with low income and without alternatives, who are deprived of the right to health and other basic rights – such as that of living on their own land, or fishing in the river near their home.
It’s not over
The report gives her voice in a section curated by Columbia Law School’s Smith Family Human Rights Clinic with interviews with over 90 people directly affected by this close contact with fossil fuel infrastructure: indigenous land defenders, fishermen, coastal communities, activists, journalists, artisans, from Brazil to Canada, from Senegal to Ecuador.
In addition to health, the plants disrupt economies and cultural identity. Legal and military tools, corruption, lack of transparency and disinformation are used to silence “against” voices and appropriate territories. And while the world gathers at COP30 to discuss its future, the fossil fuel industry continues to expand: another 3,500 plants are reportedly being proposed, developed or built, and their expansion would put another 135 million people at risk.
