Alberto Acosta, Ecuador’s former minister of energy and mining, chairman of the constituent assembly which enshrined the rights of Mother Nature in its constitution, and author of Ecuador’s offer to forgo oil exploitation in the Yasuni national park. In 2013, he ran for president of Ecuador. In Spanish, with translation.
Alberto Acosta is an Ecuadorian economist and the country’s former minister of energy and mining. He was the driving force behind the ground-breaking Yasuní-ITT Initiative, an offer by Ecuador to fight climate change by forgoing oil exploration and production in a large tract of untouched rainforest. Acosta is also the ex-president of the Constituent Assembly responsible for drawing up the now famous Montecristi Constitution, which took effect in 2008 and established protection for the rights of nature. Acosta ran unsuccessfully against Rafael Correa for president in 2013—one of eight presidential candidates. He is currently a researcher at FLASCO-Ecuador (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences).
