- Sustainable forest management plans in the Brazilian Amazon are intended to ensure compliance with strict environmental rules, but many are used fraudulently as cover for illegal logging, according to new research.
- One expert estimates that 20% of all forest management plans in the Brazilian Amazon fall under this category, where applicants file the plans simply to obtain the timber credits that correspond with the volume of wood they claim to want to harvest.
- These credits are then used to launder illegal timber — often felled in Indigenous territories or conservation areas — into the legal supply chain.
- Criminal groups use many strategies to defraud the timber credit system, including misrepresenting the species of tree they claim to want to log, or its size.
Sustainable forest management is an important strategy for generating income for local communities while keeping forests standing. Compliance with the label requires following strict rules on the choice of trees that may be cut and when and how to do so.
In the Brazilian Amazon, this works out to a maximum of three to five trees per hectare, Leonardo Sobral, forestry director at the Institute for Forest and Agricultural Management and Certification (Imaflora), a Brazilian NGO, told Mongabay.
Loggers need to plan exactly where the tree will fall and the path to drag it out of the forest so it doesn’t damage other plants on its way out. Once the trunk is removed, they won’t be able to harvest another tree in the same area for around 30 years. “There are a series of techniques that need to be followed in order to comply with the legislation,” said Sobral, whose NGO advocates for good practices in the logging sector and audits certified forest management plans.
Life on the ground, however, is often very different. “I’ve always worked inspecting forest management plans, and I’ve seen many brutal irregularities,” Vinicius Otavio Benoit Costa, an analyst with Brazil’s federal environmental agency, IBAMA, told Mongabay. “There are a number of very serious frauds, up to and including the formation of gangs and criminal organizations involving forest management.”
This mismatch between theory and real life prompted Costa, a forest engineer, to explore the issue in a master’s degree program at the Federal University of Paraná (UFP). The results of his research were published in April in the journal Trees, Forests and People.
To understand the most common irregularities in these projects, he analyzed the administrative processes initiated by IBAMA against holders of 184 forest management plans in the Amazon, most of them located in the states of Pará (88) and Rondônia (37).
The first thing that caught his attention was the checkered background of the offenders. Almost 60% had previously been fined more than three times for environmental violations, and 18.5% had been fined 10 or more times. Two companies had accumulated more than 30 penalties each. “They are in the business of crime,” Costa said.
When it comes to the most common irregularities, Costa found that 72.8% of the forest management plans presented fraudulent movement of logging credits, which is closely associated with timber laundering.
In Brazil, all logged timber must be accompanied by paperwork called the forest origin document (DOF), also known as a timber credit. Once a forest management plan is approved by environmental authorities, its owner can issue a certain number of DOFs, corresponding to the volume of trees they’re allowed to extract from that area.
“Without credit, the wood can’t reach the consumer centers,” Edevar Sovete, an environmental analyst at IBAMA, told Mongabay.
Given the DOF’s significance to the timber trade, criminal groups in the Amazon specialize in getting approval for forest management plans in areas where they don’t necessarily intend to log. They then sell the newly generated timber credits to loggers targeting areas where logging is forbidden. By attaching the genuine credits to the illegal wood, they can thus launder the timber into the legal supply chain, according to Costa.
This kind of fraud has been uncovered even in supposedly “green” initiatives. In May, Mongabay published an investigation revealing the links between a carbon credit project and an illegal logging scheme in Amazonas state. The same areas used to generate the carbon credits also had forest management plans used to generate DOFs.
The Federal Police raided the group a few weeks after the publication of the Mongabay investigation, in an enforcement known as Operation Greenwashing. They arrested five people, including the alleged leader of the organization, Ricardo Stoppe Jr. According to the investigation, these individuals were behind the illegal extraction of more than 1 million cubic meters (35 million cubic feet) of wood, the equivalent of almost 5,000 truckloads.
According to Sovete, who works in IBAMA’s specialized plant inspection center, a credit for a cubic meter of timber costs around 1,500 reais ($270), almost the same price at which it’s sold in the illegal market.
Environmental agents working on the ground have found numerous strategies for generating DOFs that are then used to launder illegal timber. Sometimes it’s glaring, like the case of a landowner whose forest management plan claimed to have extracted 170 m³ (6,000 ft³) of wood from a single tree — more than eight times the volume a large Amazonian species can supply. “There’s no tree in Brazil that can produce that much wood,” said Sovete, the official who spotted this fraud.
However, on other occasions, offenders are more creative. Costa recalled monitoring a forest management plan whose owner had claimed to have felled a particularly large ipê tree. Once in the field, Costa headed straight to the point in the forest where the tree was supposedly extracted from. To his surprise, he came across a huge chestnut tree — still standing, and nowhere near as valuable as ipê.
“That tree listed in the inventory as an ipê was actually a chestnut tree that generated 30 m³ [1,060 ft³] in credits from a species with high economic value,” Costa said.
What this indicates is that someone, somewhere, cut down an actual ipê tree, almost certainly illegally, then moved it into the legal supply chain using the credits for the other site.
Fraud also happens during transportation of the wood. Costa analyzed IBAMA inspection reports that describe heavy logs being transported by motorcycles or trucks traveling at unrealistically high speeds — clear signs that something wasn’t right. In one case, he calculated that a loaded truck would have had to travel at an average of 190 kilometers per hour (118 miles per hour) to cover the distance between the logging site and the sawmill, according to the report’s description. “It is a fraud,” Costa concluded. In fact, no timber was sent, only the credits.
The hunt for fraudsters
Sovete spends his days in his office in the federal capital, Brasília, looking at the flow of timber credits on his computer screen. His job is to detect suspicious transactions in IBAMA’s DOF system and, if necessary, to block those issuing the credits.
Thanks to his expertise, he knows that credits traveling long distances to reach sawmills near Indigenous territories or conservation areas should ring alarm bells. “The companies located in these places are the ones that cheat the system the most because they need the credit to cover up the illegal wood that they’re getting from these protected areas,” he said.
Once a suspicious transaction is detected, Sovete and his colleagues look at satellite imagery of the logging site associated with the particular forest management plan to verify if there are signs of logging in the area. Occasionally, an on-site inspection is also necessary. In some cases, however, the remote analysis is enough to prove the area is only used to issue credits that are then used fraudulently. “You look at the satellite image, and there’s not even an access road to the [logging site]. So how is he getting wood out of there?” Sovete said.
He estimated that around 20% of all the forest management plans in the Amazon are used solely to issue DOFs that are then sold to launder illegal wood. In 2022, some of the leading Amazonian research institutes reported that between 44% and 68% of the timber from the main wood-producing states in Brazil was illegal.
“Illegality in the timber sector is organic, decentralized and cultural,” Mikael Freitas, a data analyst at the Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA), a nonprofit that investigates emitters of climate-warming greenhouse gases, told Mongabay. “We see it happening at all ends of the chain, from the source to the last step.”
Freitas said he believes importers of Brazilian timber have no guarantee they’re not buying timber from illegally deforested areas. “Even certification bodies like the FSC are unable to guarantee it,” he said, referring to the Forest Stewardship Council, the world’s leading certifier of sustainable forestry.
Imaflora is one of the organizations accredited to conduct audits of forest management plans certified by the FSC. Sobral, its forestry director, said inspectors at the site can easily detect irregularities in forest management plans. “We know that fraud is possible at various links in the chain,” he said. “But when we have forest management in a certified area or one that has had some kind of third-party verification, you reduce the risk of this fraud.”
One of the main bottlenecks in curbing timber fraud is the small number of environmental agents monitoring forest management plans. According to the association that represents Brazil’s federal environmental agents, ASCEMA, there are only 700 such inspectors nationwide. That’s nowhere near enough even to cover just the Brazilian Amazon, which, if it were a country of its own, would be the sixth largest in the world. Sovete’s team, which specializes in monitoring illegal logging, has only three people. “There are too few of us to supervise so many companies,” he said.
In 2022, the federal government implemented the DOF+ scheme, which introduces an identification number for each tree section to improve timber traceability and avoid fraud. Once the sawmill processes the wood, however, tracking is lost.
“It should be tracked until it reaches the end consumer,” Sovete said.
“The new DOF makes it more difficult [to use credits fraudulently],” Costa added, “but it doesn’t stop someone from doing something illegal.”
Banner image: Sustainable forest management plans must comply with a series of environmental rules to allow the forest to regenerate. Image courtesy of Fábio Nascimento.
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Citation:
Costa, V. O., Koehler, H. S., & Robert, R. C. (2024). Characterization of technical and legal irregularities in management plans in the Brazilian Amazon. Trees, Forests and People, 16, 100548. doi:10.1016/j.tfp.2024.100548
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