Yasunization of the Earth: from the case of Amazon basin towards a world atlas of unburnable carbon

Climate change represents the greatest challenge for current and future generations as part of the paradigmatic metaphor of sustainability. This is more and more claimed in the political, social and scientific spheres, such as in the article published by McGlade and Ekins in Nature in January 2015 [1], where they argue that implementation of effective climate policies would require that around 80% of coal, 50% of gas and 30% of oil reserves remain untapped. Despite these scientific efforts of quantification of unburnable carbon, criteria for choosing spatially which reserves must remain underground have not been addressed in relation to implementation of effective policies for avoiding emissions. For instance in western Amazon, one of the most cultural and biological diverse area in the world [2], shows that oil and gas blocks cover 733414 km 2 and are in expansion since 2008, aside from 35 confirmed or suspected untapped hydrocarbon discoveries along the area. In this work, we present a new starting research project that aims: 1) to map, at global scale, on-shore hydrocarbon reserves which overlap and/or impact on biologically and culturally high sensitive areas; 2) identify unburnable carbon areas. Methodology involves the structuring of an open source GeoDatabase collecting all the ecological, anthropic, productive, economic and infrastructural data; the performing of an integrated spatially explicit Multicriteria Analysis in Geographical Information System environment. We focus on the analysis carried out in the countries that are part of Amazon basin, showing the data collection, validation, systematization, and GIS analysis processes. The first results indicate several overlaps between hydrocarbon production sectors and very high ecological and cultural areas, highlighting the role that tropical forest ecosystem services may play in exchange of unburnable oil.