Yasuní National Park

**Yasuní National Park** () is a place in Ecuador. It is a park, a place for plants and animals and some people to live. It is about  in size. It is between the Napo and Curaray Rivers in Pastaza and Orellana Provinces. It is in the Amazon Basin.  This national park has forests with lots of water and it is mostly rain forest. The park is about  from the town of Quito. The United Nations named it a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1989.  This park is inside the place where the Huaorani people lived. The Huaorani are indigenous people who have lived in Ecuador since before Europeans knew about South America. Two groups of people who have not met many other humans before, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane, also live in Yasumi. Many indigenous people use the rivers in the park to travel. Many of the rivers go into the Amazon River. Some of these rivers have a lot of tannin chemicals in their water. This means that different plants live in them than live in water without tannins. The spine-covered palm, *Bactris* *riparia,* and water plant *Montrichardia linifera* grow on the sides of the rivers.

The park has oil in it. Scientists say it could have 1.7 billion barrels of crude oil. This would be 40 percent of Ecuador's oil. Indigenous people and scientists say it would be bad to try to get the oil out of ht epark. In 2007, president Rafael Correa started the Yasuní-ITT Initiative to protect the park. This project promised to protect the park's living things if people in other countries would pay, but it did not raise enough money. People began taking oil out of the park in 2016.

In August 2023, the people of Ecuador voted about the oil in the national parks, and people stopped taking oil out of the park.

## Living things 
 in the Park]]

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Yasuní National Park (YNP) has many different kinds of living things, maybe more different living things than anywhere on Earth. This is because it is where the Equator, Andes Mountains, and the Amazon rainforest MEET. Amphibian, bird, mammal, and plant species can all be very different from each other. The park has some of the biggest numbers of plants and animals in the world: birds, trees, and bats (less than 100 km2).

### Mammals 
*]]
Many mammals live in national park. *Pteronura* *brasiliensis*, the giant otter, is an endangered species that lives in the rivers in and near the park. A species of bat, *Lophostoma yasuní*, lives in to the park. Many species of monkey lives high in the trees, for example the Eastern Ecuadorian squirrel monkey (*Saimiri cassiquiarensis macrodon)'' and Humboldt's squirrel monkey (*Saimiri cassiquiarensis)*, pygmy marmoset (*Cebuella pygmaea*), Ecuadorian white-fronted capuchin (*Cebus aequatorialis*), Red-crowned Titi (*Plecturocebus discolor*), Napo saki (*Pithecia napensis*), Colombian red howler (*Alouatta seniculus*), white-bellied spider monkey (*Ateles belzebuth*), and brown woolly monkey (*Lagothrix lagothricha*). These animals move plant seeds from place to place and remove insects from plants by eating them.

### Herpetofauna 
Yasuní has about one-third of the amphibian and reptile species in the Amazon Basin. The park has 150 amphibian species, more than other places like it with comparable landscapes. Treefrog *Osteocephalus Yasuní* is named after the park. There are 121 species of reptile.

### Fish 
The park has about 500 species of fish.

### Birds 
s perching of a tree stump on the bank of Rio Tiputini, Yasuní National Park]]

Yasuní also has at least 596 bird species, which is one-third of the total bird species for the Amazon. It has hunting birds like falcons, hawks, and eagles and other birds such as macaws, antwrens, manakins, and thrushes. Because the tree branches come together like a roof in many different ways, many different birds can live there: birds that help plants make seeds, and hummingbirds.

### Insects 
This national park has many different kinds of insects, and it has insects and plants that help each other in unusual ways. In each hectare, Yasuní has more than 100,000 different species of insects, the same as all of North America.

### Plants 
The park has many, many plants that move water inside their bodies (mostly, this means plants that are not moss).  It is one of nine places in the world that has over 4,000 different species of vascular plant per 10,000&nbsp;km2. There are many trees and smaller woody plant and lianas. In some ways, this park is has the most different kinds of plants in the world.

## Danger 
### Oil 
Yasuní National Park has about 1.7 billion barrels of oil still in the ground 40 percent of Ecuador's oil. The oil is in the Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha (ITT) oil fields. People began to look for oil in the park in 1995. In 2005, there was a plan to build more roads into the park so people could get the oil. Environmentalists and scientists, for example Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson, and Stuart Pimm, asked the government of Ecuador to tell people not to get the oil. Indigenous people and environmentalists asked the government to let the people vote about whether to allow the roads and oil drills.

President Rafael Correa started the Yasuní-ITT Initiative to protect the park and the valuable things in it in June 2007. The initiative promised to not dig for oil in the park if people in other countries would pay. The government hoped to raise half of what the oil was worth, US$3.6 billion over 12 years. By 2009 many people from many parts of the world promised to pay $1.7 billion. Not drilling in the park would prevent 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from going into the air, officials said.

Actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Edward Norton, filmmaker Michael Charles Tobias, and former Vice President of the United States Al Gore promised to help the government of Ecuador. Turkey, Chile, Colombia, Georgia, Australia, Spain, and Belgium all sent money. But President Correa said that once Ecuador would decide how to spend the money.

People began to drill for oil in 2016, and, in 2019 President Lenín Moreno allowed more drilling, closer to where indigenous people lived.

#### 2023 Ecuadorian Yasuní National Park oil exploitation referendum 
On August 20, 2023, the people of Ecuador all voted on whether people should did for oil in the park. This was the same day as the regular elections. The new law said that oil drillers that were already in the park could stop drilling slowly and that the government could not let new people drill for oil in the park. Indigenous people had asked for the law for more than ten years before the Constitutional Court said Ecuador had to let the people vote.

The voters said Ecuador should stop drilling. Politicians said this was bad for President Guillermo Lasso, who had said more drilling would be good. The government's oil company, Petroecuador, must stop drilling in the park soon.

### Other danger to the park 
Colonization, cutting down too many trees, people who come into the park to take wood even when that it against the law, and too much hunting hurt the park.

## Other pages 
* 2023 Ecuadorian Yasuní National Park oil exploitation referendum
* Finding Species
* Tiputini Biodiversity Station
* Yasuní-ITT Initiative

## References 
## Other things to read 
*
*Hennessy, L. A. (2000). Whither the Huaorani? competing interventions in indigenous Ecuador. Master's thesis, Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley.
*Lu, F. E. (1999). Changes in subsistence patterns and resource use of the Huaorani Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon. PhD dissertation. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
*Pitman, N. C. A. (2000). A large-scale inventory of two Amazonian tree communities. PhD dissertation.  Durham, Duke University.
*Vogel, J.H. (2009). The economics of the Yasuní Initiative: climate change as if thermodynamics mattered. London, Anthem Press .

## Other websites 
*"Opinion: Yasuní and the New Economics of Climate Change" CNN. Edition: International.  August 23, 2010.
*Yasuní Green Gold Campaign to save the park and its indigenous people
*Yasuní Campaign by New Internationalist
*Yasuní Campaign by Ecuadorian civil society organizations – Amazonia por la Vida 
*Background article at Deutsche Welle climate-project 'Global Ideas' on Ecuador's controversial plan to refrain from drilling for oil in its rainforests in return for money.
*Deutsche Welle report on Yasuní National Park
*
*Where do we draw the line? Documentary directed by Joseph Wordsworth, and produced by Cora Fern and Mike Smith, vimeo.com/193289299