- Title: Illegal loggers profit from Brazil's carbon credit projects
- Date: 7th July 2025
- Summary: RONDONIA, BRAZIL (FILE - AUGUST 12, 2024) (REUTERS - Access all) (MUTE) VARIOUS DRONE SHOTS OF SMOKE RISING FROM ITUXI FARM, NEAR THE KAXARARI INDIGENOUS LAND RONDONIA,BRAZIL (FILE - AUGUST 13, 2024) (REUTERS - Access all) (MUTE) DRONE SHOT OF A TRUCK CARRYING TIMBER ON A ROAD IN KAXARARI INDIGENOUS LANDS TRUCK CARRYING TIMBER KAXARARI INDIGENOUS LEADER, EDIVAN KAXARARI, S
- Embargoed:
- Keywords: Amazon Brazil Ituxi Kaxarari carbon credits investigation scam
- Location: RONDONIA, ARACATUBA, SAO PAULO & BRASILIA, BRAZIL
- City: RONDONIA, ARACATUBA, SAO PAULO & BRASILIA, BRAZIL
- Country: Brazil
- Topics: Environment,South America / Central America
- Reuters ID: LVA001260016062025RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Companies around the world have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into conservation projects in Brazil designed to protect the Amazon rainforest in return for carbon credits offsetting their emissions.
A Reuters analysis of 36 conservation projects in the Brazilian Amazon that sell carbon offsets on the global voluntary market found that at least 24 of those projects involved landowners, developers or forestry firms punished for illegal deforestation by Brazil's environmental agency Ibama.
The analysis revealed that much of Brazil’s carbon market hinges on the credibility of private landowners with a public track record of violating Brazil’s 2008 forestry code, which puts strict limits on deforestation in the Amazon.
One of the biggest names in the Brazilian carbon credit market over the past five years was Ricardo Stoppe Junior. He was arrested last June, accused of leading a vast illegal logging scheme based on fraudulent land claims.
Stoppe billed himself for years as the world’s leading carbon credit entrepreneur – a Brazilian doctor who said he put aside saving lives to help save 10,000 square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest. Since 2020, he has sold some $14.6 million worth of credits, according to a Reuters analysis of public transactions data and pricing data tracked by market watcher AlliedOffsets.
A confidential 300-page federal police report seen by Reuters suggests those violations were the least of it. Police accuse him of running a criminal outfit that bribed public officials to forge land titles and launder more than a million cubic meters of illegally felled rainforest timber. Stoppe was released to house arrest in November, and is awaiting charges in the federal probe, called “Operation Greenwashing”.
In his first interview after five months in jail, Stoppe denied taking part in such a scheme, and said his projects brought legal rigour and environmental protection to a part of the rainforest plagued by land invaders.
“There’s no state out there. No police. Nothing,” Stoppe said in an interview while under house arrest in the interior of Sao Paulo state. He chalked up the allegations against him to failed oversight by business partners and bad faith by investigators.
Two decades ago, Stoppe bought a remote tract in the Brazilian Amazon, named for “Our Lady of the Ituxi Waterfalls” after cascades considered sacred by his Indigenous neighbours in the south of Amazonas state.
“My plans were to clear it and raise cattle,” Stoppe said. He said that changed after a near-death experience in the jungle, when a branch knocked him off his horse. After a week in a coma, he said, a revelation came to him that he did not want to cut down the forest.
Stoppe’s first venture into the carbon credit market was “Fortress Ituxi,” registered in 2020 with global certification body Verra. He then recruited neighbouring ranchers to a second project pledging to protect a swathe of rainforest stretching from the Iquiri National Forest to the Kaxarari Indigenous Territory against rampant deforestation turning jungle to pastures on the nearby Bull Road.
A sales pitch of this kind is at the heart of many carbon credit projects: the worse the surrounding threat, the greater the value of the “avoided deforestation.” But police say Stoppe was selling the answer to a problem of his own creation.
The police report, based on wiretaps, bank records, land titles, logging permits and satellite imaging, explains how the scheme allegedly worked. Stoppe and his partners bribed public officials to invent claims to parts of the nearby national forest and public land along Bull Road, turning them into private estates.
Logging inside their carbon projects would yield fewer credits to sell. So instead they used their logging permits to launder wood extracted illegally from public lands such as the neighboring Kaxarari reservation, according to lead police investigator Thiago Scarpellini.
Stoppe, who was transferred to house arrest in November, insisted he would prove in court the legitimacy of all land claims in his name and denied taking part in any illegal logging or other criminal activity.
One man suspicious of Stoppe’s promises in recent years was Edivan Kaxarari, a community leader from the nearby Indigenous reservation.
On a two-hour drive with reporters down the dusty road to the gates of Stoppe's Ituxi ranch, Edivan surveyed the vanishing forests on his people's ancestral lands. For miles and miles, lush rainforest had been slashed and burned, giving way to scrubby pastures speckled with white Zebu cattle. Ibama’s enforcement database showed the agency had punished Stoppe and his partners at least six times for illegal deforestation along the Bull Road.
After watching the illegal logging advance for years, Edivan said his guard was up when people he described as “white men” visited the reservation a couple years ago preaching the environmental benefits of Stoppe's carbon credit projects and proposing a project on Kaxarari land.
Stoppe confirmed he had started discussions with the Kaxarari about partnering on a carbon credit project.
"They came with this carbon project proposal and they mentioned what had been done there on the Ituxi ranch with Dr. Ricardo,” said Edivan, who took part in the meeting. "They didn't give us much time to accept."
Edivan said he and other community leaders had concerns about the proposal, so they held off.
"If a person is working on this carbon project, then why is he deforesting?" he said. "There's something wrong there."
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