1. Nature crime in the Amazon

“Nature crime” is used to refer to illegal forms of logging, ecosystem conversion, wildlife exploitation and trafficking (both domestic and international), fishing, and mining, and is often associated with financial offenses, fraud, corruption, organized crime, as well as labor and human rights abuses. In the Amazon, it can be understood as a portfolio of illegal or illegality-tainted activities that harm forests, rivers, wildlife, and local populations, although  its legal definition is subject to variations depending on the environmental regulations of each Amazonian country and what constitutes a violation of these regulations (see Chapter III for a review of legal definitions in each country of the Amazon). 

These activities do not operate in isolation. Criminal networks involved in illegal mining, deforestation, and drug trafficking are often involved in more than one activity and frequently share financing channels.

Establishing a baseline of the extent, distribution and severity of these activities across the entire Amazon is a challenge, as they cannot all be represented spatially with the same precision or consistency. Financial transactions and criminal networks may be geographically dispersed, obscured behind opaque transactions, or impossible to attribute to specific locations. To address this limitation, the analysis presented in this report focuses on manifestations of Nature crime: the physical, observable consequences of illegal activity that leave a detectable footprint — on land cover, in river systems, or in records of violence — and that can be systematically tracked across all countries of the Amazon basin.

This report tracks the following potential manifestations of Nature crime: 

• Illegal deforestation: the permanent clearing of forest cover for agriculture, cattle ranching or other uses, that is unlawful in character — whether through the appropriation of public land or through violations of the rules governing land use and conversion in protected areas, Indigenous territories, or private properties.
• Illegal logging: the extraction of timber in violation of national forest management laws — including without a valid management plan, in excess of authorized volumes, in areas where logging is prohibited (such as protected areas and Indigenous territories), or using fraudulent documentation to launder illegally felled timber into legal supply chains. Illegal logging is both a significant source of forest degradation in its own right and a common precursor to full-scale deforestation, as selectively logged areas become more vulnerable to fire and agricultural encroachment.
• Illegal artisanal and small-scale gold mining (land-based and river-based): gold mining has expanded dramatically across the Amazon over the past two decades, driven by rising prices, weakened enforcement, and the entry of organized crime groups that use it as a vehicle for money laundering and territorial control, making it a defining feature of the region’s criminal economy. Illegal mining is both a source of deforestation, through direct removal of vegetation to access the soil where gold is found, and ecosystem degradation, through pollution of river courses from mercury use. 
• Mercury pollution: used in artisanal gold mining to bind and separate gold from sediment, mercury enters Amazonian river systems as a persistent, bioaccumulative toxin that travels across national borders through shared waterways and the food chain, reaching dangerous concentrations in fish and in the Indigenous and riverine communities that depend on them.
• Threats and violent deaths of environmental defenders: attacks on individuals who monitor, report, or resist illegal activities in and around areas subject to Nature crime. These incidents are increasingly recognized as a direct and foreseeable consequence of the broader pattern of illegal extraction, and are often perpetrated by or on behalf of the same criminal networks responsible for the crimes being denounced.

2. Why assess the extent and severity of Nature crime across the Amazon?

The ultimate goal of this analysis is to take stock of data available across Amazonian countries that could enable consistent, systematic tracking of the spatial and temporal variation of Nature crime manifestations across the Amazon — understanding where they are concentrated, intensifying, and appear to be receding. This approach seeks to address a current challenge in our understanding of the dynamics of environmental degradation that stem from criminal or illegal activities: the absence of any single, integrated data source covering all eight countries of the Amazon basin with consistent definitions and methodologies. This results in an inability to assess the aggregate scale of the problem or to identify transboundary dynamics.

Various government and civil society-led platforms generate data relevant to Nature crime monitoring across the Amazon, many of them open-source. Yet most cover only a subset of countries or years, and their fragmented, retrospective character makes it difficult to assess regional trends or the cumulative scale of the problem.

Other organizations have attempted to map Nature crime across the Amazon previously. The Igarapé Institute and InSight Crime’s Amazon Underworld platform and associated policy papers have documented how illegal mining, logging, land clearance, and wildlife trafficking are driven by organized criminal networks across five Amazonian countries, drawing on field investigation and open-source research. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) published Environmental Crimes in the Amazon: Current Trends and Rising Threats, which identified over 4,000 illegal mining sites across the region in 2023, mapped deforestation hotspots in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, and documented how criminal organizations have adapted their methods to exploit regulatory gaps. While they serve to raise awareness of the severity and extent of Nature crime as a driver of environmental degradation across the Amazon, they fall short of a systematic assessment of available data across all countries that may be used to establish a baseline of Nature crime and monitor it regularly.

Rather than use in specific legal or enforcement proceedings based in data about individual instances of environmental violations, the primary purpose of such a baseline is to raise awareness among the public of trends in the scale of the issue, to mobilize resources, and to focus policy and enforcement efforts – including contributions from civil society to these efforts – in jurisdictions where the data show that they are most needed. Several audiences stand to benefit from such a sustained, regionally integrated monitoring effort.

• For governments, consistent data on the spatial and temporal variation of Nature crime — where it is intensifying, where it is receding, and what factors are associated with each — enables a more rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of enforcement policies and operations. A regional evidence base is especially valuable for evaluating cross-border interventions and building the case for sustained investment in detection and prosecution capacity. 
• For regional governance and cooperation bodies (e.g. ACTO’s public safety commission, Amazonian Police Cooperation Center – CCPI), there is value in tracking nature crimes across the Amazon as a whole, rather than within individual national borders, and across manifestations, rather than focusing on a single issue. Nature crime is increasingly transboundary: border areas are disproportionately affected by illegal activity, and criminal networks routinely exploit jurisdictional gaps and corruption. The same criminal networks also operate across various categories, highlighting the value of datasets that consider more than one single manifestation. A pan-Amazonian evidence base is therefore essential for understanding the aggregate scale of the problem and for enabling the multi-country policy response it demands. 
• For Indigenous and local communities, a quantitative baseline of the nature crimes they face provides a foundation for advocacy with governments, donors, and international bodies, establishing more clearly when the level of threats they are facing has increased markedly and warrants further protection. 
• For civil society organizations and the donor community, a regional overview helps identify where needs are greatest and where support is most likely to have impact — whether in strengthening monitoring systems, funding enforcement operations, or supporting the communities most exposed to Nature crime.
• For the private sector, spatial data on nature crime is a valuable input to their risk management and due diligence processes. Companies importing into the European Union face supply chain due diligence obligations under voluntary and/or regulatory frameworks (such as the EU Deforestation Regulation – EUDR) and require granular, reliable data on deforestation risk in their sourcing areas. Financial institutions — banks, asset managers, and insurers — need to understand their exposure to assets tainted by illegal land conversion, a risk documented in detail in a 2024 WWF-UK report on financial crimes and land conversion.

Against this backdrop of growing relevance for policy-makers, enforcement agencies, companies, investors and civil society, a question emerges: how well can the data currently available across the Amazon basin support such assessments, and where do the critical gaps lie? Answering this question first requires understanding the type of data that would be required to assess the extent and severity of Nature crime in the Amazon. 

3. How to assess the extent and severity of Nature crime

A central difficulty to mapping Nature crime in the Amazon is that it is systematically underreported, under-prosecuted, and under-sentenced. In Brazil — arguably the country in the region with the most developed detection and enforcement systems — only around 45% of illegally deforested areas were issued infraction notices even during periods of heightened enforcement. A major contributing factor is low reporting. In many areas, more than half of all crimes are never brought to the attention of authorities, largely because communities have little confidence that action will follow. Basing the analysis on criminal convictions would provide a stronger evidentiary foundation — but conviction rates remain low: in Brazil, formal charges (indiciamento) are filed in only around 25% of environmental crime investigations.

Thus, a picture of where Nature crime is occurring or of its scale cannot be drawn from an analysis of criminal records, which would only show instances of environmental harm actually prosecuted and sentenced. This report instead maps potential manifestations of Nature crime: observable events that combine two elements — (i) evidence of environmental harm, established through remote sensing or other spatially explicit data record; (ii) grounds for characterizing that harm as a violation of applicable law, based on land designation indicating what uses, changes to natural vegetation cover, and activities are authorized. For some offences, the act itself is inherently unlawful and a spatially explicit record of its manifestation is sufficient to establish that violation (for example, release of mercury from illegal mining, or violence against an environmental defender).

This report surveys the data sources currently available across the eight Amazon countries for each of these manifestations of Nature crime, assesses their potential for consistent pan-Amazonian aggregation and presents illustrative analyses that demonstrate how these sources can be combined to shed light on the scale and legality of the harm.