In 2007, Ecuador’s then-president, Rafael Correa, announced an ambitious plan to prevent oil drilling in Yasuní National Park, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas and home to the Indigenous Waorani people, 4,000 plant species, and 300 mammal species, several of them threatened. Correa called on other countries to help Ecuador keep the area intact, in what was called the Yasuní-ITT Initiative … The new study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, evaluates different sociocultural, environmental, geographic, infrastructure and geospatial variables to identify what the researchers call unburnable carbon areas throughout the Ecuadoran Amazon. They define these areas as land free of fossil fuel extraction, which should be protected for their social and environmental importance. The methodology used in the study can be replicated and scaled across the entire Amazon Rainforest to identify areas where fossil fuel reserves should be left underground, such as protected areas and Indigenous territories that are threatened by, among other activities, encroaching oil and gas drilling activity.