When 11-year-old Ecuadorean Leonela Moncayo sees the flames from a gas flare flickering above the jungle canopy near her home in the Amazon rainforest, anger makes her determined to fight the pollution caused by decades of oil drilling.

Moncayo lives in the ramshackle tropical town of Lago Agrio at the heart of Ecuador's oil industry, where young people are leading demands for a ban on the use of flares to burn off the unwanted natural gas that escapes during crude extraction.

"I fear for my future and that of my family," Moncayo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "We live off the land, we're farmers. The water isn't safe to drink. The Amazon and its riches are being destroyed."