Financial secrets of the forests
A new report by the Financial Transparency Coalition investigates how secrecy fuel deforestation in Brazil and Cameroon.
While global deforestation fell in 2025, it remains disturbingly high, particularly in the tropics. In 2025, a total of 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary forest were lost. That’s almost twice as much as in 2024. And tropical primary forest loss is 46% higher than it was a decade ago.
A new report by the Financial Transparency Coalition investigates the illicit financial flows from illegal deforestation from Brazil and Cameroon. The report finds that illicit financial flows amount to US$1.28 billion for Brazil and US$289 million for Cameroon in timber exports every year.
“Financial secrecy prevents uncovering the real owners of the land, forestry concessions and companies who are responsible,” the Financial Transparency Coalition states.
The Financial Transparency Coalition is a global network of organisations working on illicit financial flows. The report is titled, “Financial Secrets of Forests: How Financial Secrecy Fuels Deforestation in Brazil and Cameroon”.
In a statement, the lead author of the report, investigative journalist Alfonso Daniels, comments,
“The world faces an environmental and climate crisis, with record levels of tropical forest destruction, primarily to make way for crops. The EU Deforestation Regulation, which will come into force in December 2026, along with other initiatives, seeks to address this crisis; however, persistent secrecy regarding who owns and benefits from recently deforested lands means these measures will fail or have limited impact unless there is public access to asset ownership records and the beneficial owners.”
In 2025, Brazil lost 1.6 million hectares of tropical primary forest — the highest area in the world. “A significant share of this was commodity-driven and sold to large corporations,” the report states.
Here are the key findings from the report:
Brazil’s cumulative illicit financial flows (IFFs) from timber amounted to US$2.56 billion between 2013 and 2024, averaging US$233 million per year, based on the trade mispricing method. Most of these losses occurred between 2018 and 2022, during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. Furthermore, according to SIMEX, a Brazilian NGO initiative, between 35% and 42% of all deforestation in the Amazon biome across multiple states was unlicensed. Since total timber exports from Brazil amounted to US$3.6 billion in 2024, we estimate conservatively that US$1.28 billion of timber exports that year originated from illicitly logged land.
Land without deforestation permits in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso alone accounted for a significant proportion of total soy and beef production, equivalent to billions of dollars lost in illicit funds each year. Specifically, land without these permits in this state — which is responsible for a fifth of Brazil’s forest loss in 2025 — represented 48% of all farmland used for soy production (worth US$10 billion) and 15% of all farmland used for intensive grazing for beef production in 2022 (worth US$4 billion).
In Cameroon, illicit financial flows (IFFs) resulting from trade mispricing in the timber sector caused average annual losses of US$289 million between 2013 and 2023. This figure is five times higher than the official estimated financial losses for the sector, which stand at US$59 million per year. Furthermore, the Cameroonian government has continued to grant timber licences to companies previously sanctioned for illicit trade. Despite these sanctions, these companies have still managed to export timber to countries that explicitly prohibit the import of illegally logged timber. In some cases, this has been verified through customs invoices or shipment records from Cameroon to Europe, Vietnam, and China.
Illicitly deforested land contributes significantly to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the state of Mato Grosso alone, cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from 2001 to 2023 associated with illicitly deforested land used for pasture in beef production amounted to 21.84 MtCO₂. This is equivalent to the CO₂ emissions from approximately 28.43 million flights between New York and Los Angeles. In the case of illicit deforestation linked to soy cultivation, emissions averaged 10.90 MtCO₂ per year over the same period. This is comparable to the annual emissions from driving 2.3 million typical petrol-powered cars, which is roughly the number of registered vehicles in Greater London, where there were 2.6 million registered vehicles in 2023.
Financial and land ownership secrecy prevents the identification of individuals responsible for, and ultimately benefiting from, deforestation. In Mato Grosso, for instance, publicly available satellite data only allowed us to map soya cultivation and intensive pasture on recently illicitly deforested land (post-2010) at the plot level. Using publicly available data, we were able to identify the IDs of the plots where these activities occurred, as well as their legal owners. However, information on the beneficial owners of the plots was not accessible. In Cameroon, publicly available satellite data enables the mapping of all main types of timber concessions and the legal owners of the two principal types, namely Forest Management Units (FMUs) and Sales of Standing Volume (SSV, or “ventes de coupe” in French), but not their beneficial owners.