By Rainforest Rescue
Nature, wildlife and scarce water supplies in a unique corner of southern Africa are being endangered by a rush to drill for oil. A Canadian company is pushing to explore for oil in the Kavango Basin, an environmentally sensitive area. Please support the fight against a fossil fuel project that will drive the climate crisis.Call to action
To: the President of Namibia, Hage Geingob; the Prime Minister of Namibia, Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila; the President of Botswana, Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi
“Oil drilling threatens Namibia’s and Botswana’s nature as well as the global climate. Please stop ReconAfrica’s fossil fuel project.”
“The oil needs to stay in the ground”, says Ina Shikongo. The Fridays for Future (FFF) activist in Namibia’s capital city Windhoek is fighting a project to exploit untapped oil and gas reserves in the northeast of the country. “The exploitation would be a catastrophe – not only for the global climate, but also for wildlife, water resources and the livelihoods of local people”.
The project Ina rejects so fiercely – together with further FFF activists and a citizens’ coalition – is run by ReconAfrica, a firm based in Canada. The company claims to have discovered an immense deep sedimentary basin. It obtained a license for oil and gas exploration in the Kavango delta, bought a second-hand oil rig in the US and shipped it across the Atlantic.
If the drilling of the first three test boreholes – slated for December 2020 – is successful, the company plans to extract two billion barrels of oil before drilling into deeper layers of rock. Environmentalists fear the company will use fracking despite public statements to the contrary, as its marketing materials refer to “unconventional” methods – an industry euphemism for fracking.
The ecological impacts of the projects are likely to be devastating. It would not only threaten bodies of water in the dry savannas of Namibia, but also Botswana’s UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Okavango Delta, with its unique biodiversity and huge populations of elephants, hippos, rhinos and birds. Tourism, an important source of income, is in danger while other livelihood strategies of indigenous San and local people also hang in the balance.
We need to stop ReconAfrica’s project for the sake of the climate, biodiversity, water, and the livelihoods of the local people.
Please support our demands with your signature.
