LONDON, (Reuters) – Germany, Spain and France have expressed interest in a pioneering Ecuadorean plan not to pump oil from under a tropical forest in return for international compensation, Ecuadorean officials said yesterday.
Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, on a London visit, called for support for the Yasuni initiative, under which Ecuador would leave 850 million barrels of oil, worth $6 billion, underground as a contribution to countering climate change.
In return for not exploiting the oil in the environmentally rich area, the OPEC-member country is looking to other countries to pay it $350 million a year.
“We are proposing to the world that we will leave that oil underground. That means giving up on $6 billion, but we would thereby avoid polluting the planet,” Correa said in a speech at the Chatham House thinktank.
