Illegal logging and REDD in Brazil
An investigation by Reuters reveals that illegal loggers are cashing in on carbon credits.
A new investigation by Reuters reveals that companies with a track record of illegal logging are profiting from REDD projects in Brazil. Reuters looked into 36 projects in the Brazilian Amazon and found that at least 24 involved landowners, developers, or forestry companies that have been fined by IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, for illegal deforestation.
Reuters journalists Brad Haynes, Jackie Botts, Ricardo Brito, and Jake Spring write that,
The offenses ranged from clear-cutting the rainforest without authorization to transporting felled trees without valid permits and entering false information in a government timber tracking system. Government officials and experts said these infractions reflected the range of roles in the illicit timber trade devouring the rainforest.
In 20 of the projects, Reuters found that IBAMA had fined project proponents before the project was listed with a carbon registry. In seven projects, the fines for illegal deforestation continued after registration.
Brazil’s Environment Ministry, which oversees IBAMA, told Reuters that the agency’s database of fines for illegal deforestation provides a reliable public record that “can and should” be used to determine whether REDD projects are effective.
“Failure”
Raoni Rajão previously ran the programme fighting deforestation at Brazil’s Environment Ministry before leaving in December 2024. He is a professor of environmental policy at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
“It’s a failure of the whole idea,” Rajão told Reuters. “They might be reducing deforestation in one place, but increasing emissions somewhere else with those same resources.”
The 36 REDD projects that Reuters investigated were certified by Verra, a US-based carbon certification company, or Cercarbono, a Colombian company. Reuters went through thousands of pages of documents about the projects, identified key players, and cross-checked them against IBAMA’s database of fines for illegal logging.
In five of the projects, Reuters found that IBAMA had fined project proponents for illegal logging inside their own REDD projects.
A spokesperson for Verra told Reuters that, Verra “treats any allegations of illegal activities related to a project registered in one of our programs seriously” and promised to carry out a review of all the projects exposed in the Reuters investigation.
Cercarbono has opened a formal investigation. “There is no indication that the integrity of the projects you referred to has been compromised,” a Cercarbono spokesperson told Reuters.
Buyers of the carbon credits include US plane manufacturer Boeing, Spanish telecom firm Telefonica, and Colombian petrol company Ecopetrol.
Reuters writes that,
Boeing said it had acquired carbon offsets that met widely recognized science-based standards. Telefonica said it is part of a corporate working group that aims to strengthen the integrity of the voluntary carbon credit market. Ecopetrol declined to comment.
Operation Greenwashing
In June 2024, Brazil’s Federal Police launched Operation Greenwashing aimed at a criminal organisation suspected of illegally grabbing public lands, producing fraudulent documents, selling illegal carbon credits, and illegal logging.
One of the five people arrested was Ricardo Stoppe Junior. He was accused of running a massive illegal logging scheme. He also sold carbon credits. Reuters estimates that he has sold US$15 million worth of credits since 2020.
A federal judge froze US$300 million of Stoppe and his associates’ assets. Lawyers for the five people arrested deny any wrongdoing by their clients.
Fortaleza Ituxi and Unitor REDD projects
Stoppe and his partners have been fined by IBAMA for deforestation-related offences several times since 2014.
In 2020, Stoppe registered the Fortaleza Ituxi REDD project with Verra. By 2020, IBAMA had fined him twice for falsifying information in Brazil’s timber tracking system. The fines totalled US$23,000.
In 2022, he registered the Unitor REDD project with Verra. By then, Stoppe and two other landowners involved in the project had been fined seven times by IBAMA, including for clearing rainforest and grazing cattle on deforested land. The fines totalled more than US$1.5 million.
Reuters writes that after the Unitor REDD project was registered with Verra, Stoppe and his partners were fined 18 more times by IBAMA. The offences included clearing 42 square kilometres of forest and falsifying the origin of 180,000 cubic metres of timber.
Some of the offences took place inside Stoppe’s REDD projects, Reuters reports.
Verra put the two projects on hold shortly after Operation Greenwashing. Verra also put another of Stoppe’s projects, the Evergreen REDD project, on hold. Verra is conducting “a full review” of the projects.
In a letter to Stoppe dated 13 June 2025, Verra explains that,
Verra understands that the Brazilian Federal Police investigation has targeted the project as part of “Operation Greenwashing.” The allegations and information collected so far are new to Verra and raise concerns about the project's adherence to the VCS Program rules.
Police investigation
Reuters writes that,
A confidential 302-page police report, reviewed by Reuters, documents how authorities concluded he used his carbon projects to fund a criminal scheme that bribed public officials to forge land titles and launder more than a million cubic meters of illegally felled rainforest timber.
The police report cites wiretaps, bank records, land titles, logging permits, and satellite images. Reuters writes that the police report alleges that,
Stoppe and his associates bribed public officials to invent land claims inside the national forest and other public land, turning them into private estates that they eventually grouped into carbon credit projects.
The REDD projects covered up large scale illegal logging, according to the police report. The group registered forestry management plans for their project, but then used the logging permits to launder timber that they illegally logged elsewhere.
Reuters reports Stoppe as saying that “his projects brought legal rigor and environmental protection to a part of the rainforest plagued by people who illegally seize land”.
“There’s no state out there. No police. Nothing. It’s like the Wild West,” Stoppe told Reuters.
Stoppe denies being involved in illegal deforestation.
But the lead police investigator, Thiago Scarpellini told Reuters that Stoppe was a ringleader of an illegal logging scheme that extracted timber from nearby public lands, included the neighbouring Kaxarari Indigenous Reserve.
The police report states that Scarpellini’s team of investigators compared logging permits to satellite images of Stoppe’s projects. They allege that the projects had generated enough fraudulent permits to launder more than 1.1 million cubic metres of timber.
On 21 May 2024, Mongabay published an investigation by Fernanda Wenzel into the Fortaleza Ituxi and Unitor REDD projects. The headline of the article, which is part of the Opaque Carbon series, is “Top brands buy Amazon carbon credits from suspected timber laundering scam”.
Mongabay commissioned an analysis by the Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA), a Netherlands-based organisation, after an anonymous source alerted Mongabay to the involvement of people convicted of timber laundering in the REDD projects. CCCA found inconsistencies between the volume of timber declared to the authorities and an estimate of the logging that took place based on an analysis of satellite images.
Reuters spoke to Edivan Kaxarari, a leader from the Kaxarari Indigenous Reserve. Edivan said he and other community leaders turned down Stoppe’s proposal for a REDD project on their land.
“If a person is working on this carbon project, then why is he deforesting?” Edivan said. “There’s something wrong there.”
The report highlights two problems that apply much more widely across the voluntary carbon market, and particularly those projects validated and verified by Verra. First, beyond the requirement that offset project operators should have the legal right to use the land the project is on, there are basically no requirements to ensure that all other laws are respected by the company concerned. Second, the requirements to avoid 'leakage' - deforestation simply moving elsewhere when an area of forest is supposedly protected by an offset project - are easily circumvented, and barely monitored or accounted for.
The reality is that, unless timber consumption and land conversion is reduced across entire countries and even more widely, it is likely that the protection of forest in one location will simply result in other forest being cut down, thus negating the supposed carbon benefits of the project. The 'leakage' of carbon emissions from some REDD+ projects is likely to be 100%.