Rare trees that were supposed to stay planted in the Amazon for a carbon credit program have ended up in the U.S. and international markets as lumber, according to Mongabay. Worse still, the perpetrator actively engaged in greenwashing to hide his activities.
What’s happening?
Brazilian Federal Police have been engaged in a greenwashing investigation that led them to entrepreneur Ricardo Stoppe. Stoppe purchased wide swathes of the Amazon and spun up a program whereby he would protect land at risk of deforestation in exchange for carbon credit revenue. Companies like GOL Airlines, Nestlé, Toshiba, Spotify, Boeing, and PwC all purchased credits through his program.
Lo and behold, Stoppe actually shipped exotic wood stolen from Indigenous land in this area. The endangered ipê tree takes up to 100 years to reach maturity and has nearly disappeared from the Amazon. Stoppe sent nearly 750,000 cubic feet of ipê to just one client in Portugal, with other shipments reaching the U.S., Belgium, Spain, and France between 2023 and 2024. The wood is often used for luxury pool decks, furniture, floors, ceilings, and boats. As such, the price for ipê lumber exceeds that of mahogany when it was available to purchase.
To top it all off, Stoppe used the deforested areas as illegal cattle ranches.
“He set up a scheme to win on all sides,” federal deputy Thiago Marrese Scarpellini, chief Operation Greenwashing investigator, told Mongabay. “He took possession of federal land valued at 800 million reais [$133.3 million]. Over it, he started making forest management plans, moving more than a million cubic meters of wood worth 600 million reais [$109 million]. At the same time, he is doing carbon credit projects, where he would have amassed 180 million reais [$30 million]. And now we have the hypothesis that he was using the animal transport documents to launder cattle raised in neighboring deforested areas.”
Why is Amazon deforestation important?
The Amazon sequesters roughly 340 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (374 million tons), which is about the same as the U.K.’s fossil fuel emissions. Sadly, deforestation has made it so that the Amazon is no longer carbon negative.
What’s being done about Amazon deforestation?
Stoppe, his son, and some of his accomplices were arrested in June. Amazonian deforestation is thankfully on the decline, but it’s clearly still a challenge that requires ongoing effort. Financing is coming together to power those efforts, and many preservation projects are already bearing fruit.
As for the more broad challenge of greenwashing, we have a guide on being able to spot credible efforts. Carbon credit schemes have the potential to finance truly beneficial conservation, but without proper oversight, the model is increasingly being abused.
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