Environmental Land-Use for Hydrocarbon Exploration and Exploitation in Colombia
Authors: Daza S. Diego , Pabón R. Miguel , Vergara G. Daniel , Gerardo Viña V. 
Published: December 2007

The lack of environmental land-use management for hydrocarbon activity has made its execution difficult and has hindered Colombia's economic development. The country has important oil reserves, these being mostly found on the continental land mass. The lack of an environmental land-use system could lead to the impossibility of exploitation with, environmental damage, accompanied by loss of the country's self-sufficiency within a few years. An "Environmental Land-Use for Hydrocarbon Activities" project is being developed by the "Colombian Petroleum Association" (CPA), with the consultant contribution of "Ingenieria Ambiental y Sanitaria" (INAMSA LTDA)" and "Gerencia Ambiental Estrategica" (SEA).

The project's general objective is environmental land-use management for the hydrocarbon sector, this being part of Colombia's land-use management plans; it will thus make a significant contribution towards achieving the National Development Plan's goals. The specific objectives are: to design the conceptual, methodological and institutional framework to sustain land-use management for Colombia's hydrocarbon development; to propose land-use zoning criteria for hydrocarbon exploration, exploitation and transport and reconciliation of the same; to seek out the relevant biophysical and economic information to determine environmental potential and restriction to be born in mind when locating projects; to balance natural resource and environmental availability and requirements for hydrocarbon development and to design conceptual bases for control of environmental impact for hydrocarbon activity within the environmental land-use framework.

In line with national environmental land-use management policy, land-use entities should make use of the project to take the following steps: the government will decide on suitable use zoning for areas of national interest; it will propose patterns/regulations; the government will convene social actors to achieve political conciliation where those strategies and goals can be defined; the Regional Sustainable Development Corporations, acting in concert with the proposed national scenario, will go ahead with suitable use. Environmental assessment adjustment should come from widening the country's vision of what it really is. Strategic Environmental Assessment is the evaluation tool.

The project's main activities include: analysis of existing information; legal/geographical definition of areas restricting hydrocarbon activity; establishment of environmental criteria for incorporating hydrocarbon planning within municipal land-use management formulation; evaluation of soil use and monitoring plans for land-use follow-up.

It also covers the development of criteria and indicators allowing goals to be established for environmental land-use management and for evaluation of ecosystem quality in relation to: oil activity, the environmental protection programme preparation and execution, high risk prevention during exploration and exploitation phases and the handling of population migration phenomena and relocation of indigenous groups.

Expected final results are to: identify oil development zones, incorporate technical criteria for oil industry location, incorporate clean technology, establish areas having land-use management for ethnic minority identification and develop integrated land-use analysis.

State and pressure indicators have been identified for the start of the project, related to environmental land-use management and ten-year goals have been established for such indicators.

Four pressure indicators have been identified and their actual and goal values have been established, corresponding to the project's development.

In the same way, as part of the project's initial activities, a methodology for landscape quality assessment, related to oil industry activity, has been proposed in the research work" Assessment of the quality of land scope related to the oil industry activities, case study: Department of Huila" (E. León 1999). This work proposed a methodology for the selection of indicators used for the assessement of land scope´s quality. This assessment refers to all landscape functions: ecological, cultural, social and economic. This task's first step was to establish terms of reference including aims, participants, location and assessment methods. The assessment itself then included three activities:

✦ assessment tool selection; ✦ information gathering; ✦ evaluation of results, involving all participants.

The following step was the definition of a framework, boundaries and the area of a particular landscape. The case study was focused on the oil industry's same four framework relationships: ecological, geographical, cultural and socio-economic.

Many indicators for evaluating landscape quality have been suggested in the literature. Often, only a few of them are suitable. A methodology has been proposed for selecting indicators for each oil industry activity. These indicators are expected to represent the social, ecological and economic aspects related to landscape functions.