U.N. green agency works with polluters
RESGUARDO BUENAVISTA, Colombia — At the edge of the Colombian Amazon, in an Indigenous village surrounded by oil rigs, the Siona people faced a dilemma.
The United Nations Development Program had just announced a $1.9 million regional aid package. In a village with no running water, intermittent electricity and persistent poverty, any money would mean food and opportunity.
But the aid program was part of a partnership between the U.N. agency and GeoPark, the multinational petroleum company. The company holds contracts to drill near the Siona reservation, including one with the government that would expand operations onto what the Siona consider their ancestral land. To the Siona people on the Buenavista reservation, oil drilling is an assault, akin to draining blood from the earth.
This collaboration is one example of how one of the world’s largest sustainable development organizations partners with polluters, even those that at times work against the interests of the communities the agency is supposed to help.
From Mexico to Kazakhstan, these partnerships are part of a strategy that treats oil companies not as environmental villains but as major employers who can bring electricity to far-flung areas and economic growth to poor and middle-income nations. The development agency has used oil money to provide clean water and job training to areas that might otherwise be neglected.
But internal documents and dozens of interviews with current and former officials show when the United Nations has partnered with oil companies, the agency has also tamped down local opposition to drilling, conducted business analyses for the industry and worked to make it easier for companies to keep operating in sensitive areas.
The agency’s Colombia office in particular is a revolving door of officials moving in and out of oil companies and government energy ministries. The U.N. development agency has also worked with the government and the oil industry to compile dossiers on drilling opponents.
There is no evidence those dossiers were used to target anyone, but in a country where environmental activists are killed at a rate higher than anywhere else in the world, activists and community members said they felt their lives had been put at risk.
Even as the United Nations sounds the alarm on climate change and calls for a dramatic reduction in fossil fuel consumption, its development arm at times serves as a cheerleader for the oil and gas industry.
“The oil and gas sector is one of the industrial sectors worldwide capable of generating the greatest positive impacts on people’s development conditions,” the U.N. Development Program wrote in 2018.
The development agency said it supports a clean energy transition and does not encourage drilling. But Achim Steiner, the agency’s head, said its mission is to bring people out of poverty and that often means working in countries that are built on coal, oil and gas. “We have to start where economies are today,” Steiner said. “I don’t see a contradiction, but there is a tension.”
Adding to that tension, current and former officials say, is a relentless fundraising pressure. The agency takes a cut — from about 3 percent to 10 percent — of donations. Officials, backed by the agency’s own audits, say that puts pressure on development officers to find partners in their assigned countries, even when the donors work against their agency’s interests.
Internal emails show senior officials have bristled at having to put a glossy sheen on the world’s dirtiest companies — a process critics call blue washing, after the organization’s signature color.
In 2017, for example, two years after world leaders adopted the Paris climate agreement, the agency published a report on the positive role the oil and gas industry could play for the world. It listed an Exxon Mobil recycling initiative and Chevron’s promotion of engineering in classrooms.
“I really think this publication is problematic, as it aims to portray the oil and gas industry in a favorable light,” one agency employee wrote in a group email. The report “was undermining our message on sustainable energy,” read another email.