On Aug. 4, 2026 C.E., Colombian President Gustavo Petro signed a resolution placing 186,500 square miles of the Colombian Amazon off-limits to new mining and oil and gas development — creating what stands as the largest extraction-free zone in the Amazon basin. No new permits for mineral extraction or hydrocarbon development can be requested or granted within that zone. Existing projects may continue until their contracts expire, but nothing new can begin.
At a glance
- Amazon extraction ban: The resolution prohibits three things outright — issuing new mining concessions, signing new oil or gas contracts, and granting the environmental permits that would accompany either activity.
- Indigenous territories: More than half the protected area, roughly 55%, consists of indigenous reserves — and those territories retain 99.5% of their forest cover intact while holding approximately 78% of all the carbon stored in the Colombian Amazon.
- Forest loss drivers: Between 2016 and 2023 C.E., the Colombian Amazon lost 1.95 million acres of forest — accounting for 60% of all deforestation recorded across the country during that period.
A legal tool dusted off after 50 years
The resolution does not create a national park. It doesn’t fit any existing conservation category. Instead, the government reached back more than 50 years to invoke Article 47 of Colombia’s Natural Resources Code, which allows the state to exclude an entire region from private exploitation rights.
That mechanism had been used before — but only in pieces, never across the entire Colombian Amazon at once. The scale here is genuinely new.
A narrow exception remains: small-scale extraction of construction materials for local road repair is still permitted, though even that is off-limits within indigenous territories.
The legal foundation runs deeper than a single resolution. In 2018 C.E., Colombia’s Supreme Court recognized the Colombian Amazon as a “subject of rights” — granting the rainforest legal standing to be protected in its own right. In 2025 C.E., the Constitutional Court reinforced that precedent by designating it a specially protected ecosystem. The Aug. 4 resolution builds on both rulings. It is part of a broader fossil fuel phase-out movement gaining ground in countries across the Americas and beyond.
Why the Amazon’s water matters far beyond the forest
The Ministry of Environment’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 scientists call “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 Bogotá’s water supply.
The ministry’s report 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 region currently stores an estimated 6.5 gigatons of carbon. What happens in the forest, in other words, does not stay in the forest.
Scientists describe a “fishbone effect” at work in extraction zones: when a road is cut to service a mining or oil project, it branches into side roads that open the door to settlement, illegal logging, and illicit crops far beyond the area originally authorized. Deforestation in the Amazon has long followed this pattern, and the resolution is designed specifically to stop that chain from starting.
Indigenous stewardship at the center of the plan
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. Those territories retain 99.5% of their forest cover intact and hold approximately 78% of all the carbon stored in the Colombian Amazon.
The data point is striking: where Indigenous communities govern the land, the forest fares better than anywhere else.
Before signing, the government consulted the region’s Indigenous peoples at a meeting on July 19 and 20, 2026 C.E. 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. That gap is real, and how the incoming government handles it will matter. This story fits into the growing body of climate progress built on Indigenous land rights and conservation science working in parallel.
The political test ahead
Petro signed the resolution just three days before incoming president Abelardo de la Espriella took office on Aug. 7, 2026 C.E. During his campaign, De la Espriella pledged to revive oil exploration and legalize hydraulic fracturing across Colombia, describing it 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 could become one of the first flashpoints between the two administrations. Whether the protection holds will depend entirely on a government that did not sign it — but inherits it, already in effect, from its very first day in office.
For now, Colombia 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 new mining and oil extraction out of its portion of the forest. The commitment is real. The test of it is just beginning.
Compared to Brazil’s recent deforestation reductions and international ocean protection agreements, Colombia’s move represents one of the largest single acts of extraction prohibition by any national government in the Amazon’s history. Before 2022 C.E., 164 active mining titles, 284 pending applications, and 39 active oil and gas contracts were already operating in the region — all of which may continue under existing terms, but none of which can be renewed or expanded once their contracts expire.
That is a permanent ceiling on extraction, even if it is not an immediate end to it. And for a forest that stores 6.5 gigatons of carbon and supplies water to 670 million people, a permanent ceiling may be exactly what the science requires. Further reading on the Amazon tipping point research published in Science gives context for why the region’s governments are acting with increasing urgency.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Lyx Planet — Colombia protects 42% of its territory, creating the Amazon’s largest reserve
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Colombia bans new oil and mining projects in the Amazon
- Britain becomes the world’s largest economy to end new oil and gas exploration
- The Good News for Humankind archive on climate action
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