Colombia has placed nearly half of its Amazon territory off-limits to extraction.
On Aug. 4, 2026, just days before the end of his term, President Gustavo Petro signed a resolution protecting 186,500 square miles of the Colombian Amazon—roughly 42% of the country—from any new mining or oil and gas projects.
In plain terms: no new permits for mineral extraction or hydrocarbon development can be requested or granted within that zone.
Existing projects remain untouched, but no new projects can move forward.
What Does This Mean in Practice?
This is not a national park, nor does it fit any existing legal category.
The government reached back more than 50 years to invoke Article 47 of the Natural Resources Code, which allows the Colombian state to exclude an entire region from private exploitation rights.
This mechanism had been used before—but only piece by piece. Never across the entire Colombian Amazon all at once.
The resolution prohibits three specific things: issuing new mining concessions, signing new oil or gas contracts, and granting the environmental permits that would accompany either activity.
What About Projects Already Underway?
Existing operations continue.
The measure takes nothing away from those who already held valid permits. Before the resolution was signed, there were 164 active mining titles, 284 pending applications, and 39 active oil and gas contracts.
All of these projects may continue operating until their contracts expire, but without any possibility of renewal once that deadline arrives.
The effect, then, is not a sudden halt to everything already in motion—it is a permanent ban on anything new.
One narrow exception remains: small-scale extraction of construction materials for local road repair is still permitted, though even that is off-limits within the Amazon’s indigenous territories.
The Timing Was No Accident—and It Made Waves
The resolution was signed just three days before incoming president Abelardo de la Espriella took office on Aug. 7.
During his campaign, De la Espriella staked out the opposite position on energy: he pledged to revive oil exploration and legalize hydraulic fracturing (fracking) across the country, describing the practice as modern and responsible.
His incoming environment minister has already signaled that fracking will proceed in “certain areas.”
The new government has not yet commented on the Amazon reserve specifically.
But because this is an administrative resolution rather than a law, it would not be surprising if it became one of the first flashpoints between the outgoing and incoming administrations.
Why the Outgoing Government Said It Was Urgent
The figures the Ministry of Environment cited to justify the measure are stark.
Between 2016 and 2023, the Colombian Amazon lost 1.95 million acres of forest—60% of all deforestation recorded across the country during that period. Between 2022 and 2024 alone, another 645,000 acres disappeared.
The technical diagnosis describes what specialists call a “fishbone effect”: when a road is cut to service an extractive project, it branches into side roads that eventually open the door to settlement, illegal logging, and illicit crops far beyond the area originally authorized.
The move also rests on a legal foundation. In 2018, Colombia’s Supreme Court recognized the Colombian Amazon as a “subject of rights”—effectively granting the rainforest legal standing to be protected in its own right.
In 2025, the Constitutional Court reinforced that precedent by designating it a specially protected ecosystem.
What Is at Stake for Climate and Water
The Ministry’s central argument rests on the biome’s role in regulating the continental water cycle.
According to World Economic Forum data, the Amazon’s roughly 400 billion trees release approximately 20 billion tons of water vapor into the atmosphere every day—a phenomenon known as flying rivers.
Around 670 million people across Latin America depend on those invisible rivers, which supply much of the moisture that feeds rainfall in Colombia’s eastern mountain range and in high-altitude wetlands like Chingaza, which is critical to Bogota’s water supply.
What happens in the forest, in other words, does not stay in the forest.
The ministry’s report also flags a graver risk: that the Amazon could reach a tipping point from which it could not recover on its own—gradually transforming from rainforest into something closer to savanna. The consequences would be catastrophic. The region currently stores an estimated 6.5 gigatons of carbon.
The Role of Indigenous Communities
Of the total protected area, 22.9% was already within Colombia’s national protected areas system before this resolution. More than half—55%, or about 66.2 million acres—consists of indigenous reserves.
One figure here stands out: those indigenous territories retain 99.5% of their forest cover intact and hold approximately 78% of all the carbon stored in the Colombian Amazon.
In short, where indigenous communities are in control, the forest fares better than anywhere else.
Before signing the resolution, the government consulted the region’s indigenous peoples at a meeting on July 19 and 20.
With Black, Afro-Colombian, Raizal, and Palenquero communities, however, that consultation had not yet concluded—so the resolution explicitly states it will not apply to their territories until the process is complete.
All told, Colombia now stands as the strictest of the eight countries that share the Amazon basin—alongside Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname—in its commitment to keeping mining and oil extraction out of its portion of the forest.
Whether that commitment holds will depend entirely on a government that did not sign the measure but inherits it—already in effect—from its very first day in office.
