A stunning sight when seen from the air: the illegal logging that is bleeding the Amazon dry.

BarcelonaDeforestation is a striking image when seen from the air. The continuous green of the forest ends abruptly, severed by a cruelly straight cut, leaving only barren land. From a bird's-eye view, the visual impact is devastating and helps to capture the tragedy of the destruction of tropical forests. Drones used by Reuters photographers Adriano Machado and Ueslei Marcelino have revealed this deforestation in a southern region. from the AmazonIn the Brazilian state of Rondônia, the destruction even affects part of a protected indigenous territory, that of the Kaxarari people.

What the images don't convey is the complexity of the criminal conspiracy behind this destruction. The trucks loaded with logs that the drone captures crossing the rainforest appear to be the result of illegal logging hidden behind a supposed carbon emissions reduction project, no less.

These days The Brazilian Amazon is more at the center of the world than ever before, because it is hosting the UN climate change summit, COP30.The choice of this unique ecosystem as the meeting place for the world's governments is intended precisely to draw attention to the importance of tropical forests in the fight against global warming. The Amazon captures millions of tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year, but this very climate-regulating capacity is being threatened by the constant deforestation and degradation of the rainforest due to economic overexploitation. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is hosting COP30 with the promise to halt and reverse Amazon deforestation.

But a Reuters report published in recent weeks reveals that even the mechanisms the UN put in place to reduce global CO₂ emissions are contributing to the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. voluntary carbon markets They are used to promote projects that reduce CO₂ emissions, either by reforesting or preventing deforestation, and to sell these carbon credits to companies to offset their emissions.

Operation Greenwashing

Reuters has analyzed 36 conservation projects in the Brazilian Amazon that offer carbon credits and found that at least 24 include individuals or companies that have been repeatedly fined by the Brazilian government for illegal deforestation. The most striking case is that of Ricardo Stoppe Junior, who was arrested in 2024 as part of a police investigation called Operation Greenwashing.

For the past five years, Stoppe has presented himself as a carbon market entrepreneur, selling millions of CO₂ credits for projects he claimed had saved 10,000 square kilometers of rainforest from deforestation. But in reality, he bribed authorities to obtain fraudulent land titles and logging permits (issued for controlled logging), which he used to illegally cut down trees and sell the timber as if it were legal. All the while, he presented his projects as conservation efforts so that companies worldwide would buy his carbon credits. Stoppe's criminal scheme also involved illegally extracting timber from the Kacharari Indigenous Reserve.

Inspectors from the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) are working to combat deforestation. But the main protectors of the Amazon have always been Indigenous peoples, such as the Kacharari, who are directly threatened by scourges like illegal logging.

The flagship initiative of the The Brazilian COP30 initiative has been the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF). which has propelled Lula da Silva to power and has already raised $5.5 billion. Representatives from 53 countries signed the declaration of adherence to this fund in the Amazonian city of Belém, where the summit is being held, and pledged to protect all tropical forests, which are located in the Global South. It remains to be seen whether this new green capital will end up creating loopholes like those generated by voluntary carbon markets, and whether it will also be used to fuel criminal plots that are bleeding the Amazon dry.