Since the U.S. ousted Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, earlier this year, officials in Caracas have been looking for ways to increase oil production, including by attracting foreign private investment. In February, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited facilities operated by Chevron and met with interim government officials, describing plans to unlock “Venezuela’s enormous potential.” New supply contracts are routing Venezuelan crude to U.S. refineries while a new reform law is supposed to attract foreign oil companies with lower taxes and other incentives. Increased production could have an adverse environmental impact as activity ramps up, many conservation groups say. In Venezuela, oil blocks overlap with protected areas, and leaks have been a problem for decades. “From an environmental point of view, an immediate reactivation without investment in infrastructure is almost a sure formula for environmental damage from spills,” Eduardo Klein, a marine ecology professor at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, told Mongabay. New mapping analysis by Mongabay reveals the extent of the potential threat to the country’s numerous ecosystems, including mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, coral reefs and Amazon rainforest, among others. The map was made with data from the World Database of Protected Areas and oil block maps from ProVita, an environmental nonprofit. It shows that Venezuela has 538,883 square kilometers (208,064 square miles) of protected areas and 177,843 km2 (68,666 mi2) of oil blocks, some of them already in production and others in the pre-exploration or exploration phases. An estimated 70,785 km2 (27,330 mi2) — or around 13% — of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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