Introduction #

“Nature crime” or “crimes against nature” 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.¹,² In the context of the Amazon, it can be understood as a portfolio of illegal or illegality-tainted activities that harm forests, rivers, wildlife, and local populations³, although legally speaking this definition is subject to variations depending on the environmental regulations of each country of the Amazon region and what constitutes a violation of these regulations.

Nature crime does not occur as a series of isolated incidents, but rather as part of an interconnected network – or ecosystem – of crime⁴, in which environmental offenses are closely linked with corruption, economic crimes, human rights violations, and violence.⁵ This ecosystem feeds on rising commodity prices (notably gold)⁶, commodity laundering (particularly of timber, gold, and cattle), remote frontiers with little governmental presence^7,8,9, disputed or parallel territorial control exercised by organized criminal groups¹⁰ and governance gaps in Amazonian countries regarding environment protection.

Some of these governance gaps, such as insecure or incomplete land tenure systems¹¹, disordered cadastral registries¹², limited territorial presence and operational capacity of state agencies¹³ or corruption within regulatory bodies¹⁴, create fertile ground for widespread environmental violations. Others, such as corruption of enforcement institutions¹⁵ or the fragmentation among environmental, mining, policing, and prosecutorial authorities¹⁶, hamper an effective response to these violations at national and subnational levels. Thus, Nature crime in the Amazon is sustained not only by the direct commission of illegal acts but also by persistent institutional and regulatory weaknesses that severely limit the accountability of those causing environmental harm.

Accountability for environmental harm requires the production and validation of reliable evidence, the timely initiation of investigations, the prevention of corruption and intimidation of prosecutors and judges, and the effective sanctioning of perpetrators. While law enforcement and criminal justice are (and should remain) prerogatives of the State, government institutions often receive contributions from civil society that help reduce information asymmetries, increase accountability, and sometimes through the provision of services.

To explore this auxiliary role of civil society, we map it against five main stages of the response of government authorities to environmental harm. Taken together, these stages can be described as an “evidence-to-accountability pipeline” through which cases of potential environmental violation must move from their initial definition to their detection, investigation (and prosecution in the case of criminal offenses), adjudication by administrative bodies or criminal courts and ultimately, execution of the sanction. At each one of these stages, civil society contributes in different ways, either by collaborating with authorities or compelling them to take action.

The following sections provide examples of contributions of civil society that complement efforts from governments to promote accountability for environmental violations and Nature crimes, organized around a typology of 7 contributions of civil society (see Figure 1). These examples and the typology are derived from a survey of 41 civil society organizations and 16 interviews (see below section on Methodology for more details). These different types of contributions are mutually reinforcing through “collaborative pathways” (represented by the grey arrows in Figure 1), some established and some that could be further strengthened.

Figure 1. Stages of government response along the accountability pipeline and civil society contribution

Below, we go over the various stages of the accountability pipeline and provide an overview of ways that civil society contributes to them:

Stage 1. Conceptualization and definition of Nature crime: this foundational step involves defining what constitutes Nature crime by identifying which environmental violations qualify as criminal offenses and ensuring their incorporation into penal codes, environmental laws, and administrative regulations. The clarity and comprehensiveness of these legal definitions directly determine what can be prosecuted, who can be held accountable, and what sanctions can be imposed.

• At this preliminary stage, civil society’s contribution is to advocate for prioritization of the Nature crime agenda (Section 1), by shaping the policy debate and press for legal reform for these categories of offenses to be clearly established and, to the extent possible, harmonized across Amazonian jurisdictions.

Stage 2. Monitoring and detection: This stage involves the identification and detection of manifestations of potential environmental crimes, as they occur or shortly thereafter. This requires establishing robust monitoring systems, both technological and institutional, capable of identifying these manifestations across vast and often remote territories. The challenge is particularly acute in the Amazon, where the scale of territory, limited State presence, and transnational nature of criminal operations complicate detection efforts.¹⁷

• At this early stage, civil society can play an important role in independently monitoring cases of potential environmental violations (Section 2), as well as strengthening investigative capacity of government authorities through training and technical support, strengthening the probative value of evidence collected.

Stage 3. Investigation and prosecution: Once potential manifestations of environmental crime are detected, the investigation stage must establish both the occurrence of the illegal act and, ideally, the identity and culpability of those responsible. This may include site inspections, sample collection, photographic and video documentation, witness statements, and the creation of comprehensive case files. The quality of evidence gathered through investigation often determines whether cases can proceed to prosecution and judgement.

Prosecution rates remain low in many Amazon countries, reflecting both limited judicial resources dedicated to environmental crime and the complexity of cases involving organized criminal networks¹⁸ .

• This is both a critical pinch point in the pipeline due to limited capacity of government authorities, and where civil society’s contributions are concentrated. Civil society contributions at this stage can take several forms. First, the raw material from monitoring and detection requires an analysis of legality (Section 3). Depending on the political context and relationship with authorities he results of this analysis can be shared directly with prosecutors (Section 4) or with the public, through pressure campaigns (Section 5).

Stage 4. Judgement or application of administrative sanction: The formal legal process through which documented evidence is presented to judicial or administrative authorities for determination of guilt and assignment of responsibility. This encompasses the presentation of evidence before courts or administrative tribunals, and the issuance of judgements. The violations of environmental, land-use and natural resource regulations may trigger administrative sanctions – such as fines, embargoes, and licenses suspensions – as well as criminal liability, when the conduct involves fraud, corruption, money laundering, violence or significant environmental harm.

• As cases advance through prosecution and judgement, civil society may participate in court proceedings (Section 6), providing a range legal and technical support through mechanisms such as amicus curiae¹⁹ or technical expertise.

Stage 5. Execution of sentences and/or sanctions: Even when environmental crimes are successfully prosecuted, the effectiveness of these rulings ultimately depends on whether judgements or sanctions are properly enforced. This includes the collection of fines, seizure of illegally obtained assets, execution of imprisonment sentences, and revocation of licenses or permits. Success rate at this stage is critical: without credible execution of punitive measures, the entire accountability process loses its power to deter future environmental violations. In many Amazon countries, the execution of sanctions is hampered by limited enforcement capacity, corruption, and the prioritization of other criminal justice concerns.²⁰

• At this stage, CSOs can contribute to accountability through systematic assessment of the effectiveness institutional responses (Section 7), helping to track whether environmental crimes effectively progress through the accountability pipeline and whether sanctions are ultimately enforced.

Methodology²¹

The information contained in this report is derived from two main sources: a survey and semi-structured interviews to generate an exploratory assessment of CSOs (CSOs) addressing nature-related crimes across the eight Amazonian countries. First, a desk-based mapping was conducted using Amazon Conservation’s network to identify active CSOs and ensure broad geographic coverage. Based on this mapping, a survey was disseminated through partner networks and public channels. The questionnaire, composed of 56 questions across seven thematic sections, captured organizational characteristics, engagement with environmental crimes, data collection and use, legal capacities, operational challenges, and participation in networks and partnerships. Using a non-probabilistic sampling approach, the survey gathered 41 responses from organizations operating across all Amazonian countries.

Building on the survey findings, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a targeted subset of organizations to deepen and contextualize the analysis. Ten CSOs were selected based on their reported experience with legal actions related to environmental crimes, complemented by additional interviewees to ensure representation across all countries. The interviews followed a flexible structure combining 24 guiding questions with the possibility to adapt to each organization’s context. They explored litigation strategies, interactions with judicial and administrative authorities, barriers to legal action, enforcement dynamics, and perceptions of legal and policy frameworks, as well as the nature of relationships between governments and civil society. This mixed-methods approach enabled a more nuanced understanding of both the operational realities and legal dimensions shaping CSO engagement in addressing environmental crimes in the Amazon region. Further methodological details are provided in Annex I, and a summary of the respondents’ composition and responses is provided in Figure 2 and 3, below

Relevance of this report

For CSOs: By clearly identifying their respective roles, mandates, thematic expertise, along the accountability pipeline and by developing a clear typology of civil society contributions, the report seeks to support the consolidation of an articulated “ecosystem of environmental defenders” capable of responding effectively to the “ecosystem of environmental crimes”²² operating across the Amazon basin. By documenting the strategies and lessons learned by CSOs operating in diverse legal, political, and institutional contexts, it identifies the conditions under which their contributions are most effective and the persistent challenges that limit their impact, highlighting opportunities for emulation across organizations and countries.

For governments: For State institutions across the Amazon, this report demonstrates that civil society is not merely an external observer, but a vital operational partner in addressing the complex, transnational mechanics of Nature crime. By mapping how CSOs generate technical evidence, monitor remote territories, and support complex investigations, the findings (in detail below) illustrate how governments can leverage these specialized capacities to overcome their own institutional and resource constraints. Furthermore, this chapter lays the groundwork for the comparative assessment presented in Chapter III, demonstrating that a State’s engagement with civil society can directly enhances the effectiveness, reach, and resilience of its action against Nature crime.

For donors and funding partners: By mapping existing capacities and identifying remaining gaps, challenges, and opportunities, the report highlights the financial, technical, and institutional resources required to ensure a more sustained, coordinated, and impactful engagement in the fight against Nature crime across the region.

For the Amazon Sustainable Landscape Program (ASL): The ASL Program is an initiative operating across eight Amazonian countries, aimed at improving integrated landscape management and ecosystem conservation. These objectives depend not only on conservation interventions, but on functioning accountability systems, capable of deterring and sanctioning the environmental violations that undermine them.

By documenting lessons learned and good practices from CSOs across all eight Amazonian countries, this report offers a body of knowledge that can be shared with ASL grantees, implementing partners, and government counterparts, providing an evidence base for strengthening their cooperation with civil society acting on Nature crime.

Figure 2. Composition of survey respondents
(41 organizations surveyed across 8 countries)

Figure 3. Overview of main survey results

Contributions of civil society in the fight against Nature crime #

As seen in Figure 1, contributions of civil society span various stages of the accountability pipeline, and can be broken down into several functional types, from Advocacy for prioritization of the Nature crime agenda (Section 1), Independent monitoring and detection (Section 2), Legality analysis of potential environmental violations (Section 3), Sharing of evidence with public prosecutors and judges (Section 4), Sharing of information to the public and pressure campaigns (Section 5), Participation in court proceedings (Section 6) and Systematic assessment of of government action (Section 7).

Each section explores, based on survey results and interviews:

• strategies adopted by CSOs to maximize their impact,

• challenges encountered in their implementation,

• concrete examples derived from the interviews and additional desk-based research²³

• recommendations, addressed to CSOs, donors and governments, to enhance the effectiveness of each type of contribution.

1. Advocacy for prioritization of the Nature crime agenda #

Any accountability process for Nature crimes assumes that such crimes have been formally defined and recognized within national legal frameworks. In addition to their efforts to promote accountability for already recognized crimes, many CSOs across the Amazon therefore seek to expand the definition of what constitutes a Nature crime within domestic frameworks and elevate it as a policy priority, expanding the potential for holding actors accountable for environmental harm. This contributes to Stage 1 of the evidence-to-accountability pipeline: Conceptualization and definition of Nature crimes. This contribution can take two forms: (i) direct advocacy before the legislative branch, aiming at legal reform of criminal categories, or more broadly (ii) by elevating Nature crime as a priority in domestic or regional agendas.

(i) Advocacy for the definition of Nature crimes within domestic legal frameworks

A successful example of this type of contribution can be found in advocacy efforts by organizations such as Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental (SPDA), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Oceana Perú,in Peru, which contributed to the incorporation of wildlife and flora trafficking into the country’s organized crime framework through Law No. 31622 (2022), expanding the legal recognition of environmental harms as forms of organized criminal activity.²⁴

Respondents to the survey and interviews related using the following strategies to effectively influence legislative processes and shape the legal definitions of Nature crimes:

• Relying on the use of objective, technical evidence, such as data from remote sensing monitoring systems. This strengthens the credibility of CSOs participating in legislative debates, supports legal reforms and decreases the risk on environmental defenders (ICV, Brazil).

• Maintaining long-term relationships with public authorities, by combining public advocacy with direct dialogue with legislators, ministries, and high-level decision-makers (ICV, Brazil; FCDS, Peru).

The following challenges were noted:

• Sustained engagement in legislative processes, however, requires financial resources, technical expertise, and continuous presence, which many organizations struggle to maintain over the long term (Instituto SocioAmbiental, Brazil).

• Advocacy efforts frequently face political resistance and competing interests from actors who benefit from weaker environmental regulation, thereby limiting the adoption or ambition of proposed reform (Instituto Centro de Vida, Brazil).

• Finally, engagement in legislative debates can expose CSOs to risks of intimidation and pressure, particularly at subnational levels, complicating their ability to advocate safely and effectively.

This type of contribution feeds into the legality analysis of potential environmental violations (Section 3): advocacy efforts push for clearer and more comprehensive legal definitions of nature crime, establishing the normative benchmarks against which detected activities can be assessed.

(ii) Elevating Nature crime to the regional policy agenda

Respondents also noted that beyond domestic frameworks, an important strategy is to elevate Nature to a priority in regional cooperation fora, such as the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA) or Andean Community (CAN).

• This is considered crucial given that many instances of Nature crime are cross-border, policy and enforcement coordination among Amazonian countries (Instituto Igarapé, Brazil).

• This approach also involves reframing environmental degradation as a critical security issue and promoting convergence in the definition and regulation of environmental crimes to close regulatory loopholes exploited by transnational criminal networks (AARIMO²⁵, Instituto Igarapé) — as illustrated by the Igarapé Institute case in the box below .

A challenge to this approach lies with the varying levels of commitment to environmental regulation across Amazonian countries, which can hinder regional consensus and harmonization efforts, a barrier that the Igarapé Institute has addressed through a distinctive model of discreet diplomacy and strategic reframing.

Igarapé Institute — Reframing Nature crime as a Security Issue # The Igarapé Institute (Brazil) works to shift how Nature crime is defined and prioritised within political frameworks across the Amazon basin. Recognising that illegal deforestation, land grabbing, and illegal mining were largely absent from security and criminal justice agendas (often dismissed by law enforcement as subsistence activity rather than organised crime) the organisation developed a strategy to reframe environmental harm as a public security threat. Rather than pursuing litigation, Igarapé pursued influencing decision-makers through applied research and sustained “discreet diplomacy”: building trust with officials, brokering closed-door dialogues between authorities who would not otherwise meet, and coordinating positions behind the scenes before formal negotiations. This approach contributed to two concrete outcomes at the regional scale: Working alongside the Brazilian and Colombian governments and OTCA’s secretariat, Igarapé helped secure the inclusion of Nature crime in the Belém Declaration of 2023. The organisation had also been instrumental, since 2021, in convincing OTCA member states that security was a legitimate institutional domain for the body which led to the creation of a Public Safety Commission within OTCA with a dedicated environmental crime sub-commission.

Recommendations #

Based on the experiences documented, the following recommendations can help CSOs’ contributions to be more effective at this stage.

• Mapping existing legal gaps in your country’s definition of Nature crime, using comparative frameworks from other Amazonian countries as reference points. Legal reform is more likely to advance when it can be framed as alignment with a regional framework rather than a unilateral domestic demand.

• Engage legislative committees and regulatory agencies directly through written submissions, technical hearings, and expert testimony, acting as technical partners in the drafting process of legal texts.

• Build coalitions with other CSOs to present a unified front. Coalition advocacy is more effective at this stage because legislators and regulators are more likely to treat a demand as reflecting broad societal consensus when it comes from multiple organizations, and less likely to dismiss it as a single-interest position.

• Use successful reforms from neighboring countries as advocacy tools domestically. For example, the SPDA’s role in Peru or CEDIB’s advocacy in Bolivia. Peer examples can work because they shift the debate from whether reform is desirable to whether it is feasible.

• Reframe Nature crime as a security and governance issue. This expands the coalition of potential allies beyond the environmental sector, bringing in actors, such as ministries of justice, security agencies, or anti-corruption bodies, whose engagement significantly increases the political weight of the advocacy.

2. Independent monitoring and detection #

Once what constitutes an environmental violation²⁶ has been defined, the next step in the accountability process requires the detection of acts or environmental harm constitutive of that violation. Capacity to detect and monitor potential environmental violations vary widely between countries of the region (see Chapter I), but a constant is the contribution of CSOs to that step of the accountability process.

Monitoring and detection emerged as the most reported primary approach among survey respondents, with almost two thirds of respondents identifying it as central to their work. For monitoring illegal mining, for example, 22% of the CSOs surveyed collect their own data through remote sensing technologies²⁷, and 28% use various forms of community-based monitoring.

This contributes to Stage 2 of the evidence-to-accountability pipeline: Monitoring and detection. Given the variation in governments’ monitoring capacity, however, the role of civil society differs across national contexts:

• Where technical capacity and access to imagery is low but willingness of authorities is present (e.g., Peru), civil society can step into the role of data partner, sometimes through formal agreements with authorities.

• Where both technical capacity and willingness is low, civil society may use independent detection to raise the alarm and apply domestic and/or international pressure on governments to take action.

• Where technical capacity and access to data is high (e.g., Brazil), civil society will still typically continue to independently monitor and detect potential manifestations of Nature crime. In this context, the independence of civil society guarantees against potential reversals of political will to maintain these systems or use them effectively.

Below, we present three strategies adopted for CSOs for monitoring and detection and associated challenges. The first is the use of remote sensing technologies (i), followed by community-based monitoring (ii).

(i) Remote sensing and imagery

Across the Amazon, remote sensing tools have enabled a step change in the capacity of civil society to monitor manifestations of Nature crime, with unprecedented speed and precision (see Chapter I). Many organizations collaborate with research institutions, NGOs, and technology partners to share analytical tools, monitoring data, and technical expertise (76% of organizations indicated partnering with other organizations). This collaborative approach allows organizations to aggregate data and methodological expertise, generating standardized and comparable information on environmental pressures across the region.

• The Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program (MAAP) is one such example (see box below), and has worked with a range of local organizations to help contextualize remote sensing evidence and communicate it to relevant authorities.

• Conservación Amazónica – ACCA (Perú) elaborates Policy Reports. These reports constitute technical analysis documents based on the interpretation of satellite imagery and other geospatial monitoring tools, prepared to provide timely, objective, and technically sound information for decision-making by the competent authorities investigating environmental crimes in specific areas of the Amazon.

• In addition to satellite imagery, FCDS (Colombia) highlights the use of low-altitude overflights to gather data that satellite images might miss, explaining that government entities often do not have capacity to follow-up on satellite imagery with low-altitude overflights. FCDS provides this crucial information, especially for activities like illegal mining under forest canopy or specific land-grabbing markers that are invisible to standard satellite monitoring.

However, organizations relying on remote sensing face significant technological and financial barriers. Access to advanced monitoring technologies and high-resolution satellite imagery remains uneven, pointed out as the top difficulty by 49% of the surveyed organizations. Furthermore, there are inherent environmental and technical constraints as conditions such as persistent cloud cover and limitations in imagery resolution can affect the reliability of satellite-based monitoring.

• A practical response to both constraints is the use of freely available radar-based imagery. Conservación Amazónica – ACCA in Peru, for instance, built its Radar Mining Monitoring (RAMI) platform on Sentinel-1 radar data, which is open-access and capable of penetrating cloud cover.

Another challenge is that, while the use of remote sensing data to document evidence of Nature crime is widespread, challenges in using that information to compel authorities to take action sometimes comes from a lack admissibility of remote sensing evidence²⁸:

• Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales – DAR (Peru) has advocated for the legal admissibility of satellite monitoring as evidence, working with specialized environmental prosecutors (FEMA). This ensures that remotely collected data holds weight in legal proceedings, reducing the need for risky on-the-ground evidence gathering in certain contexts. However, gaps remain, as FEMA prosecutors and satellite monitoring units still face a technical capacity gap in interpreting and assessing remote sensing evidence, limiting its full evidentiary use.

• The Instituto Democracia e Sustentabilidade – IDS (Brazil) has worked to strengthen the legal standing of satellite-derived evidence in environmental proceedings. Through its JusAmazônia platform and sustained advocacy before judicial and prosecutorial bodies, IDS contributed to building the institutional environment that led to the formal recognition of remote sensing data as valid evidentiary input in Brazilian courts.

(ii) Community-based monitoring

Recognizing that satellite data alone is often not enough to document environmental crime – as it cannot reveal who is responsible or uncover cases of coercion, CSOs have developed successful community-based monitoring strategies.

• CSOs increasingly support Indigenous and local monitoring systems that combine territorial knowledge with digital reporting tools and participatory mapping (Amazon Conservation Team – ACT, Suriname and Guyana; Conservacion Amazonica – ACCA, Peru). A key component of this strategy is training and capacity-building for local monitors. Programs that train community members in environmental monitoring techniques strengthen local capacity to document environmental crime, providing on-the-ground verification of environmental damage and irregular permits.

• Instituto Socioambiental – ISA (Brazil) actively fosters a network of indigenous or non-indigenous researchers for collaborative monitoring and evidence production. For example, they support the data collected by the Yanomami Indigenous Territory Alert System – an initiative led by the Indigenous organizations of the territory, including the Hutukara Yanomami Association and the Wanasseduume Ye’kwana Association. ISA provides the technical infrastructure and capacity-building that makes this Indigenous-led system function, ensuring that community-sourced findings are documented in formats that can support accountability processes.

• The integration of field and community-based documentation, such as testimonies, local knowledge, and on-the-ground observations complement technological monitoring and strengthen the evidentiary record, can also provide a more comprehensive view of the violations.This can help transform technical monitoring outputs into clear, structured evidence packages that prosecutors and judges with limited environmental expertise can readily interpret and act upon (Instituto Centro de Vida, Instituto SocioAmbiental, Brazil; SOS Orinoco, Venezuela).

A central challenge to this approach involves security risks for environmental monitors. Collecting and publishing information about illegal activities can expose communities and organizations to threats, intimidation, or violence (68% of respondents use the information for awareness-raising campaigns or media engagement).

• Security was highlighted as a high-priority challenge by 41.5% of survey respondents. In many cases, communities fear retaliation when denouncing illegal activities such as illegal mining, illegal logging or land grabbing.

• Some organizations have responded to this by developing tools that reduce individual exposure, such as the Wãnori system used by ISA and the Hutukara Yanomami Association, which allows Indigenous monitors to report incidents via app, radio, or WhatsApp without direct identification, and anonymous digital reporting platforms such as Wildlife Sentinel, which protects the identity of those reporting suspected crimes.

Independent monitoring and detection is a pivotal activity in the work of CSOs fighting Nature crime. It provides the foundation for legality analysis (Section 3) and the subsequent sharing of data with prosecutors (Section 4), for use in public pressure campaigns (Section 5) or in court proceedings (Section 6). It is also a key input for systematic assessments of governments’ action (Section 7).

Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program (MAAP) Independent Satellite Monitoring of Nature Crime The Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program (MAAP), a flagship program of Amazon Conservation (USA), implemented in partnership with Conservación Amazónica – ACCA (Peru), and Conservación Amazónica–ACEAA (Bolivia), and a network of local partners across the region, illustrates how effectively civil society monitoring can adapt to the institutional realities of different national contexts. Combining high- and medium-resolution satellite imagery, drone data, and radar algorithms, MAAP delivers near real-time detection of illegal mining, logging, and deforestation across the Amazon biome, spanning all nine Amazonian countries. Crucially, its methodology is designed not only to detect forest loss but to determine its legality, pinpointing the most urgent cases as they happen. MAAP works in two complementary ways: 1) by providing government agencies and law enforcement with confidential intelligence reports that can support field operations against illegal activity, and 2) by publicly sharing the most urgent cases to build awareness and pressure for action. Beyond case-specific enforcement support, MAAP also produces broader thematic analyses of the Amazon as an interconnected system—covering deforestation trends, flying rivers, tipping points, and carbon dynamics. This model has strengthened the capacity of public authorities across the region to link detection directly to enforcement response.

Recommendations #

The following approaches reflect what CSOs across the Amazon have found to work in practice, drawing on a range of organizational sizes, technical capacities, and national contexts.

• Seek partnerships with governmental agencies, when there is political willingness. Partnerships between CSOs and public institutions contribute to improving national monitoring systems and facilitating the circulation of environmental information.

• Use freely available tools to integrate satellite imagery and deforestation alerts into workflows. Platforms such Global Forest Watch, MapBiomas Alerta and Amazon Mining Watch provide responsive analytical capacity, making credible remote sensing accessible to organizations of all sizes.

• Join or contribute to existing multi-organizational monitoring alliances suited to your context— such as MAAP for rapid-response analytical and enforcement support, or MapBiomas Alerta for validated deforestation alert data). Pooling analytical capacity and sharing methodologies avoids duplicating infrastructure and allows smaller organizations to access capabilities they could not build independently.

• Develop and strengthen community-based surveillance and monitoring networks by training leaders and vigilance committees from local and indigenous communities in standardized protocols for observing, documenting, and recording environmental crimes during territorial patrols, while incorporating security and protection measures to safeguard their well-being. This strategy generates timely, high-resolution information that complements satellite remote sensing, strengthens communities’ capacity to respond, and fosters greater local participation and ownership in surveillance, oversight, and accountability processes—ultimately contributing to the sustainability and resilience of monitoring systems in the face of technical limitations or institutional change.

• Where political will exists, formalize data-sharing agreements with public authorities who already hold monitoring infrastructure. This allows CSOs to focus scarce resources on analysis, legal interpretation, and advocacy rather than data collection, and builds institutional relationships that can facilitate evidence transfer at later stages of the pipeline. (see also Section 4)

• In contexts where institutional willingness is low, use independent monitoring to generate external pressure. Documented evidence published publicly or shared with international actors has prompted governmental responses in cases where domestic channels were unresponsive, making monitoring itself a lever for accountability even before formal processes are engaged (see also Section 5).

3. Legality analysis of potential environmental violations #

The detection of resource use or land cover change activities through satellite imagery or community monitoring does not, by itself, establish that a violation has occurred. A critical intermediate step in the accountability pipeline therefore involves determining whether detected activities are a meaningful indication of illegal conduct.

Although this verification function would ideally rest with public enforcement agencies, limited investigative capacity across many Amazonian countries has led CSOs to increasingly assume it, increasing the probative value of evidence shared with prosecutors and judges. This type of contribution therefore bridges Stages 2 and 3 of the accountability pipeline (Monitoring and Detection; Investigation and Prosecution), by transforming raw detection data into legally meaningful evidence of potential violations.

The main strategy used by CSOs is to cross-reference data on potential manifestations of Nature crime with official administrative records— such as mining cadastre databases, land tenure registries, environmental permits, or authorizations for deforestation— to qualify monitoring data and identify presumed cases of illegality.

• Portal da Transparência do Ouro (WWF Brazil) aggregates publicly available data relevant to assessing the legal compliance of gold mining activities against the standards established by Brazilian law, consolidating information on administrative processes, satellite imagery, and financial and geographic data into a single platform.

• Imazon (Brazil) has created the Simex (Sistema de Monitoramento da Exploração Madeireira), that uses medium-resolution satellite imagery to detect logging infrastructure — roads, log yards, and skid trails — and then cross-references detected activity against the SINAFLOR authorization records from government, to classify areas as authorized, unauthorized, or of uncertain status.

• This information can also be combined with other spatial data to provide a wall-to-wall “presumption of illegality” spatial layer, that can be readily combined with recurring detection data to provide a regular, jurisdictional-level breakdown of how much of a given activity is associated with a low, medium or high presumption of illegality (see box below and Chapter I, Section 4).

• Another strategy is to establish formal cooperation with public governmental bodies for the exchange of data. This cooperation allows authorities to gain access to specialized technical expertise, including geospatial analysis and evidence development, to support complex investigations, thereby helping to overcome institutional gaps in technical knowledge, analytical capacity, and access to environmental data (Centre for Climate Crime Analysis, Peru – see box below).

• Importantly, legality analysis need not be conducted by the same civil society organization that produced the raw monitoring data. CSOs often collaborate in that regard to complement each other’s expertise.

This type of contribution is also beset by a number of challenges:

• Limits on data accessibility often constrain the exercise. Many respondents mention facing limited access to open governmental data and incomplete or outdated public registries on mining concessions, land tenure, and environmental permits severely hinder the ability of CSOs to properly contextualize monitoring alerts and verify the legal status of detected activities (Conservacion Amazonica – ACCA, Peru; Conservacion Amazonica – ACEAA, Bolivia; Fundacion Ecociencia, Ecuador; ICV, Brazil).

• Establishing a presumption of illegality falls short of identifying potential culprits to be investigated by authorities. Records on pending use rights (concessions, authorization) do not always identify the rightsholder. Rightsholders will often claim that the harm was caused by external actors that they have no control over. Finally, where no tenure information is available, it may be even more difficult to link the activity to a specific person or company (Conservacion Amazonica ACCA, Peru; IDS, Brazil).

Once the initial evidence of environmental harm has been qualified through a legality analysis, it is ready to feed into the next stages of the accountability process. There, CSOs will choose, depending on the specifics of the evidence and the relationship they enjoy with authorities, to either share it directly with prosecutors and judges (Section 4), or reveal it to the public in a bid to put pressure on authorities to take action (Section 5). This information may also be used in court proceedings (Section 6) or, where it is collected systematically over long timeframes, used as a way to assess the effectiveness of authorities’ enforcement capacity (Stage 7).

Centre for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA), Peru # Forensic Legality Analysis # The Centre for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA) Peru, applies a forensic methodology to establish the legal status of environmental violations in Peru, with a specific focus on cases where domestic enforcement has failed and where the illegal activity is embedded in international supply chains. CCCA investigates the role of international actors involved in illegal deforestation in Peru, with a focus on the palm oil sector as a notorious global driver of deforestation. CCCA’s legality analysis combines satellite imagery, open-source investigation, geospatial data, and legal review of land titles and environmental permits to establish forensic presumptions of illegality. Satellite analyses by CCCA documented clear deforestation on the land of Ocho Sur, Peru’s second-largest palm oil company, which is linked to over 15,500 hectares of forest loss. Building on this analysis, a coalition including CCCA and Indigenous organisations filed a complaint before the Dutch OECD National Contact Point against Louis Dreyfus Company for sourcing palm oil from illegally deforested land, resulting in the NCP concluding the complaint merited further consideration.29

Amazon Mining Watch – Amazon Conservation, regional Cross-Referencing Detection Data with Legal Frameworks Amazon Mining Watch (AMW), an AI-powered platform, goes a critical step further by systematically cross-referencing detected mining sites with national legal frameworks to generate structured presumptions of illegality. Based on an analysis of potential overlaps with land designations and applicable regulations, AMW incorporates a location-based presumption of illegality classified across four levels: very high, where activity occurs without a permit inside a protected area; high, where activity falls outside any explicit concession; medium, where activity occurs within a concession whose active status cannot be verified or which does not meet legal requirements; and low, where activity is within an active concession but full compliance cannot be confirmed. This legality layer is currently operational for Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, with expansion to remaining Amazonian countries planned for 2026.

Recommendations #

Based on documented practices across the region, the following entry points offer CSOs a pathway to build or strengthen their capacity to analyze the legality of evidence of potential environmental violations.

• Develop systematic cross-referencing protocols between monitoring data and official administrative registries. Building structured, repeatable assessment methodologies increases the speed and breadth of legality analysis, enabling organizations to move beyond case-by-case verification toward jurisdictional-scale assessments.

• Qualify instances of environmental harm by degrees of presumption of illegality rather than directly calling out instances as illegal, to avoid overstepping on the responsibilities of prosecutors and judges and reduce the risks of defamation lawsuits or even violence of threats.

• Establish partnerships with legal teams or academic institutions to strengthen the evidentiary quality of illegality assessments. This allows CSOs with detection capacity to access specialized knowledge that strengthens the legal standing of their findings without needing to maintain full in-house legal expertise on a permanent basis.

• Produce standardized, court-ready documentation formats that translate technical findings into legally legible outputs. Presenting environmental information that does not require the interpretation by prosecutors and judges increases the probative value of the evidence, bridging the gap between detection and prosecution that often causes cases to stall.

4. Sharing of evidence with public prosecutors #

Although several countries have developed specialized environmental investigation units, either within their police force or their environmental agencies, many prosecutors lack the required expertise to handle evidence of potential Nature crimes. An important contribution of many CSOs in the Amazon is therefore to translate monitoring and detection results into formats that can be readily used by authorities in the pursuit of investigation, prosecution, or adjudication of environmental violations.

This action by CSOs primarily supports Stage 3 (Investigation and Prosecution) of the accountability pipeline, by equipping prosecutors and enforcement agencies with the technical evidence needed to advance cases toward formal proceedings.

This type of contribution is widespread, with 78% of CSOs surveyed claiming to have shared their data with public authorities. Importantly, this type of information sharing does not necessarily amount to a formal complaint, which would require a CSO to formally identify itself as the reporting party. Formal complaints can trigger a legal process that can expose the organization and lead to financial burdens, while informal data sharing affords the organization a degree of operational distance from the proceedings that follow.

CSOs employ a range of strategies in sharing evidence with authorities:

• CSOs translate monitoring data, geospatial analysis, and field observations into structured evidentiary documentation, in the form of technical reports, case files, and georeferenced datasets. In Brazil, ICV has built sustained working relationships with Mato Grosso prosecutors, adapting its analysis to their evidentiary standards. This ensures that complex technical data is transformed into admissible scientific proof that can be readily understood by prosecutors who may lack environmental expertise.

• Many organizations highlighted the importance of maintaining direct working relationships with institutional actors involved in environmental enforcement. Rather than relying solely on formal reporting channels, CSOs often collaborate with specific prosecutors or enforcement officials who are familiar with environmental crime cases and with the role civil society can play in supporting investigations (ICV, Brazil; FCDS, Colombia and Peru; DAR, Peru).

• Another key aspect of evidence-sharing is long-term evidence compilation, which prevents authorities from claiming a lack of information or uncertainty about the extent of environmental harm. Fundación Río Napo (Ecuador) exemplifies this strategy by meticulously documenting illegal mining activities over extended periods. This evidence garnered international attention, making the government “uncomfortable” and ultimately leading to a judicial order for restoration work on the site.

• The data shared can also go beyond the mere description of environmental damage. A compelling example of this is the Mining Impacts Calculator developed by Conservation Strategy Fund (CSF) in collaboration with Brazilian authorities, a tool designed to estimate the socio-environmental and economic cost of illegal gold mining in monetary terms that prosecutors policymakers can readily use to advocate for appropriate penalties, including monetary fines (see box below).

• These collaborative relationships are, in some cases, formalized through cooperation agreements between CSOs and public authorities (FCDS and WCS in Peru). Such partnerships often emerge as authorities seek to strengthen their technical capacity, particularly in the interpretation and use of environmental and geospatial data. FCDS emphasizes that they act as a “technical intelligence” hub, bridging the gap between raw environmental data and the legal requirements of the state, especially when government agencies lack sufficient technical professionals to analyze complex environmental data. In Peru, the work of Conservacion Amazonica – ACCA also illustrates how sustained formal cooperation can progressively strengthen the technical capacity of State enforcement institutions to independently use and act on satellite-derived evidence (see box below).

A central challenge to this contribution is the risk of retaliation from individuals or companies implicated by the data shared with prosecutors. Respondents faced with these security risks mention the use of measures, such as acting through an alias or constructing a chain of information to shield those on the ground – meaning that field monitors collect and pass information to an intermediate contact, who then transmits it to the organization, so that no single person holds the full picture and the identity of those closest to the violation is never directly traceable in the documentation (SOS Orinoco, Guardianes del Bosque, Venezuela; Instituto Centro de Vida, Brasil).

Conservación Amazónica – ACCA, Peru Embedding Civil Society Evidence into State Enforcement Systems Conservación Amazónica (ACCA) in Peru illustrates how a civil society organization can move beyond simply producing evidence in parallel to state institutions and instead become structurally embedded within them. ACCA developed a multi-level strategy to ensure that satellite-derived evidence of crimes against nature reaches law enforcement authorities and is usable by them. Between 2018 and 2025, ACCA delivered 520 confidential reports to prosecutors, environmental authorities, indigenous representatives, and the press, contributing to at least 15 direct field interventions with the presence of authorities. Crucially, ACCA did not limit itself to producing and transmitting evidence. It supported the creation of specialized satellite monitoring units within the Specialized Environmental Prosecutor’s Office (FEMA) in Madre de Dios and within the National Forest and Wildlife Service (SERFOR), and has since provided ongoing technical support to the monitoring units of SERNANP, the Forest and Wildlife Resources Oversight Agency (OSINFOR), and the Ministry of Culture. In February 2023, this work culminated in the launch of Peru’s National Network of Satellite Monitoring Units, which brings together 14 state institutions and 3 civil society organizations under a common framework.

Conservation Strategy Fund, regional # Mining Impacts Calculator # A persistent obstacle to prosecuting Nature crime across the Amazon is the difficulty of quantifying environmental harm in terms that courts and administrative bodies can apply to determine sanctions. Conservation Strategy Fund (CSF) developed two tools that directly address this gap. Its Mining Impacts Calculator30 was originally developed in partnership with Brazil’s Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office. In one concrete case, prosecutors initially calculated damages of a lower amount against an illegal mining company, but using the tool, the MPF adjusted the figure to R$268 million to include social damages related to deforestation, erosion, and mercury contamination, enabling the MPF to obtain a legal seizure of the company’s assets in a public civil action.31 CSF expanded the Calculator to Colombia, Peru, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador, and Bolivia, creating a common regional framework to improve comparability of assessments and strengthen accountability across the Amazon. In Peru, CSF held meetings with officials from the Ministry of Environment and the Attorney General’s Office to promote implementation, and trained officials from the regional governments of Loreto and Madre de Dios alongside civil society and academic representatives.

Recommendations #

The following approaches reflect how CSOs in the region have successfully navigated the transition from evidence production to evidence sharing, and what conditions have made that transition more effective.

• Formalize relationships with Public Prosecutor’s Offices and environmental enforcement agencies through protocols or memoranda of understanding. Structured agreements ensure that evidence transfer survives staff turnover, political transitions, and institutional reshuffles, moments when informal relationships tend to break down.

• Translate technical monitoring outputs – satellite imagery, geospatial data, remote sensing results – into legal formats accessible to prosecutors and judges. Prosecutors and judges often lack the technical background to interpret raw monitoring data; organizations that do this translation work significantly increase the usability of their evidence and favour a robust legal case.

• Document successful cases of evidence used and share them with relevant authorities. Building a visible track record demonstrates the value of CSO contributions and helps open doors with institutions that remain hesitant to engage, turning individual successes into institutional legitimacy.

• In contexts where rule of law is weak or institutions are compromised, consider operating through legally registered entities in other jurisdictions. This preserves the ability to document and share evidence safely when working domestically would expose the organization or its staff to unacceptable risk.

5. Sharing of information to the public and pressure campaigns #

When formal engagement strategies, such as briefings to authorities or the submission of complaints, fail to provoke a response, CSOs often turn to public dissemination of information and pressure campaigns as an alternative pathway to trigger institutional action. Survey respondents mention the use of a range of outputs, primarily reports and media campaigns (58.5%), followed by community education materials (46.3%), public data platforms (41.5%, and academic publications (39%).

This type of activity operates as a cross-cutting lever across Stages 2 through 4 of the accountability pipeline (Monitoring and Detection; Investigation and Prosecution; Judgement), by generating public pressure that can unblock inaction at any of these stages when formal channels prove insufficient.

• One strategy mentioned by respondents is the translation of technical data into accessible formats for the public, such as reports, visualizations, and media content, a critical step to broaden outreach and increase visibility. ISA’s 2021 report³² on the Yanomami territory, for instance, combined satellite imagery, epidemiological data, and Indigenous researchers’ ethnographic accounts into a single public document that was subsequently presented by federal deputies in Congressional hearings and by the Minister and FUNAI president to the President of Brazil during an official visit to the territory (Instituto Socioambiental, Brazil).

• Coupled with this is the strategy of strategic timing of information release, where CSOs align publication with legal actions, policy windows, or moments of heightened attention to enhance impact and responsiveness. Amazon Conservation Association, for example, timed the release of a report on the projected impact of the BR-319 highway on rainfall patterns and Amazonian flying rivers to coincide with a moment of heightened public debate, following the Brazilian government’s announcement of a $75 million investment in the road’s construction through the heart of the Amazon.³³,³⁴

• Leveraging international visibility through dissemination on global platforms and media can also amplify the pressure on national authorities and increase the reputational costs of inaction. For instance, international visibility of deforestation and gold mining impacts on platforms such as the Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program (MAAP) has successfully impacted regulation by making governments uncomfortable with global scrutiny (Fundación Río Napo, Ecuador; Amazon Conservation/MAAP, Venezuela). Public visibility can sometimes trigger institutional action more rapidly than formal legal submissions alone (Instituto SocioAmbiental, Brazil; Fundacion Rio Napo, Ecuador).

These exposure strategies face their own set of challenges:

• Limited responsiveness from authorities may persist even when evidence is widely disseminated, as the position of public authorities can stem from competing interests rather than lack of information.

• Tensions between the goals of confidentiality and public exposure create difficult trade-offs. Evidence prepared for legal processes may require confidentiality to protect sources and maintain the chain of custody, while advocacy strategies often rely on the public dissemination of information.

• Perhaps most critically, increased visibility of environmental crimes may expose communities and activists to retaliation, particularly in contexts with weak State protection. Risks to environmental defenders represent a high-priority concern for organizations conducting public campaigns.

• In Venezuela, NGOs frequently face obstacles to formal registration or have their legal recognition blocked by the State. To navigate these restricted civic spaces, some groups adopt informal or community-based forms of organization (Grupo de Trabajo de Asuntos Indígenas – GTAI in Venezuela), as working through decentralized community-based structures allows documentation activities to continue without depending on institutional recognition that may never be granted. Others operate through legally registered entities outside their home country to continue their systematic documentation of environmental crimes safely (SOS Orinoco in Venezuela).

• In Peru, a similar dynamic is emerging through regulatory channels. In 2025, Peru’s Congress approved Law No. 32301, which amends the law creating the Peruvian International Cooperation Agency (APCI), commonly known as the “Ley APCI.” This law introduces new restrictions on civil society organizations and international cooperation, establishing an over-regulation scheme that limits their functioning and restricts legal advocacy against the Peruvian State in cases involving the protection of fundamental rights, including those brought by indigenous peoples. It also introduces a regime of steep sanctions and fines that creates a chilling effect on human rights defense work, discourages citizen reporting and oversight, and restricts the exercise of freedom of expression, association, and advocacy by CSOs, disproportionately affecting the defense of rights for the most vulnerable populations.

To navigate these tensions and risks while maintaining their effectiveness, some CSOs rely on coalitions and multi-partner platforms for their public pressure campaigns. By working through joint initiatives rather than acting alone, individual CSOs can distance themselves from the most confrontational aspects of campaigns while maintaining their collaborative relationships with government bodies.

This approach is particularly valuable when a CSO needs to simultaneously criticize government action through public campaigns while maintaining technical cooperation with the same institutions on other fronts. In Brazil, for instance, Instituto Centro de Vida participates in the Observatório Socioambiental de Mato Grosso (Observa MT), a network also comprising the Federação dos Povos Indígenas de Mato Grosso, Operação Amazônia Nativa, and other organizations, which monitors socio-environmental agendas and tracks legislative and executive action at the state level (Instituto Socioambiental and Hutukara Yanomami Association, Instituto Centro de Vida/ObservaMT, Brazil; Conservacion Amazonica – ACEAA/GITOR, Bolivia).

The coalition structure allows the collective voice to carry weight while individual members retain the flexibility to engage in ongoing institutional relationships. Beyond coalition-based visibility management, some organizations go further in calibrating their institutional exposure on a case-by-case basis, as illustrated by ICV’s approach in the case box below.

Instituto Centro de Vida, Brazil Public Campaigns in High-Risk Contexts # In contexts where environmental defenders face direct physical threats, the decision of how, and under whose name, to conduct public advocacy can be consequential. Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV) in Brazil illustrates how organisations operating in high-risk territories carefully calibrate visibility to protect both staff and local partners. In the case of Cristalino State Park in northern Mato Grosso, ICV made formal representations to the Public Prosecutor’s Office while deliberately managing attribution, routing actions through an intermediary channel rather than under ICV’s institutional name, and shielding the identity of locally-based staff and partners. The organisation describes this approach as a “fragile protection barrier”: imperfect, but sufficient to reduce exposure in a context where visible association with the case carries real personal risk. This approach contributed to the reopening of a legal case concerning the park’s protection, demonstrating that carefully calibrated public pressure, combining formal legal engagement with strategic management of institutional visibility, can generate accountability outcomes even under significant security constraints.

Recommendations: #

The following pathways draw on documented CSO experience in the region to illustrate how public communication and pressure campaigns can be designed and deployed effectively, including in high-risk contexts.

• Use open data portals to disseminate findings widely and regularly. Publicly accessible dashboards and reports can generate sustained attention beyond a single news cycle, maintaining pressure on institutions without requiring ongoing investment in each new publication.

• Build relationships with trusted media partners in advance, before evidence is ready to go public. Established channels allow findings to be amplified responsibly and accurately when the moment arises, reducing the risk of misrepresentation and increasing the reach and credibility of the message.

• Develop clear internal criteria for when to go public, weighing the potential to trigger institutional action against risks such as alerting perpetrators, endangering community monitors, or undermining ongoing legal proceedings.

• Calibrate campaigns to the audience and goal, distinguishing between efforts aimed at mobilizing public opinion, pressuring specific agencies, or influencing international actors. Each requires a different message, format, and channel.

• Document the outcomes of past campaigns, including cases where public pressure successfully unblocked institutional inaction. This builds an internal evidence base for future strategic decisions and provides funders with concrete proof of impact.

• Monitor and respond to new legal and regulatory restrictions on civil society, such as Peru’s Law No. 32301 (“Ley APCI”), which can limit CSOs’ advocacy capacity and chilling their ability to conduct public pressure campaigns, particularly in defense of the most vulnerable populations.

6. Participation in court proceedings and litigation #

Judicial proceedings represent the formal mechanism through which accountability is ultimately established. It is a comparatively less utilized contribution to the evidence-to-accountability pipeline, with only 12% of respondents to the survey mentioning direct involvement in this type of activity.

This involvement of CSOs at court proceedings primarily supports Stage 4 (Judgement or Application of Administrative Sanction) of the accountability pipeline, by providing courts and tribunals with expert evidence that strengthens the basis for a determination of guilt and assignment of responsibility.

The low proportion of respondent organizations that mention directly participating in litigation reflects the structural reality that criminal proceedings related to environmental violations are initiated and led by the State, typically through Public Prosecutor’s Offices. While these structural constraints limit CSOs to a supporting role, their contribution at this stage can be decisive in determining whether cases succeed and what remedies are obtained.

To overcome these structural limitations, CSOs employ several strategies:

• Where criminal prosecution is difficult or slow, CSOs may support action before administrative agencies, environmental tribunals, or specialized jurisdictions such as agro-environmental courts or Indigenous justice systems. In Venezuela, where criminal enforcement of constitutionally recognised environmental rights has remained largely ineffective in practice, GTAI has worked to strengthen Indigenous customary jurisdictions as an alternative accountability channel (see Chapter III, Venezuela country profile).

• Many organizations also participate through mechanisms such as amicus curiae (friend of the court) submissions (Instituto Centro de Vida – ICV in Brazil, Conservación Amazónica – ACEAA in Bolivia), producing technical reports, geospatial analysis, and expert documentation that can be used by prosecutors, judges, and allied litigants.

• In contexts of weak rule of law where the government fails to prosecute or rule against environmental crime perpetrators, some organizations also choose the path of appeal before international jurisdictions. CSOs may bring evidence before regional and international human rights bodies such as the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights to generate scrutiny and pressure for accountability. GTAI and SOS Orinoco have pursued engagement before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as their primary accountability avenue for illegal mining, supported by specialized legal partners such as the Due Process of Law Foundation. (SOS Orinoco in Venezuela, GTAI in Venezuela).

Challenges to legal action include

• Lack of legal capacity, which can represent a substantial barrier as many organizations do not have the internal expertise required to pursue complex environmental litigation (34% of respondents ranked “lack of legal or institutional support” among their top 3 challenges). Maintaining an in-house legal team or securing continuous legal counsel can be difficult, particularly for organizations that rely on project-based funding. This is compounded by high financial costs and lengthy judicial processes.

• The fact that judicial proceedings related to environmental crime are often long and resource-intensive. Because CSOs usually operate under project-based funding, participating with a specialized technical team throughout such processes often becomes unfeasible (Guardianes del Bosque & GTAI, Venezuela; IDS, Brazil).

• Accessing international judicial mechanisms requires substantial financial resources, specialized expertise in international and human rights law, and the ability to support the participation of affected communities and expert witnesses throughout lengthy legal proceedings (AARIMO, Colombia; SOS Orinoco, GTAI, Venezuela).

• Participation in environmental litigation can expose organizations and their staff to security risks. Publicly denouncing environmental crimes or contributing technical evidence to legal cases can attract retaliation from actors involved in illegal mining, logging, or land grabbing, requiring organizations to implement protective measures for environmental defenders (SOS Orinoco, Venezuela; Instituto Centro de Vida, Brazil).

GI-TOR, Bolivia Civil Society Science as Expert Evidence in Environmental Litigation # GI-TOR, a consortium of scientific and conservation organisations in Bolivia, illustrates how civil society technical expertise can be formally embedded within judicial proceedings to overcome one of the most persistent bottlenecks in environmental accountability: the absence of credible, court-ready evidence of ecological damage. Environmental cases in Bolivia usually stalls at the investigative stage because neither prosecutors nor judges have access to institutions capable of providing technically rigorous, independent assessments of environmental harm. GI-TOR stepped into this gap, initially by providing technical information informally to support legal actions initiated by allied lawyers and Indigenous communities. GITOR was formally appointed by the National Agro-Environmental Tribunal as a court-mandated technical expert in proceedings against 43 illegal mining cooperatives operating on the Tuichi River. GITOR’s expert report, assessing damages across Indigenous territories of the Mosetén and Chimane peoples, is now awaiting sentencing and is expected to set a national precedent for the quantification of environmental harm. In parallel, GITOR’s technical contributions supported a constitutional action that led to the Beni River being declared a rights-bearing subject under Bolivia’s Law on the Rights of Mother Earth (SCP 1326/2023-S1).

Recommendations #

The following entry points reflect how CSOs across the Amazon have engaged in litigation and court proceedings, from contributing technical evidence to pursuing strategic cases through regional human rights mechanisms.

• Identify cases where CSOs have contributed to successful outcomes and map the strategies that made the difference. Learning from litigation that has already worked, understanding what type of evidence was used, how the relationship with prosecutors was built, and what legal arguments proved most effective, can help organizations refine their legal strategy.

• Where domestic channels are blocked, explore regional human rights mechanisms such as the IACHR. Mapping these alternative pathways in advance, even before they are needed, allows for CSOs to have a strategy when domestic avenues close.

• CSOs should map the legal mechanisms available in their jurisdiction — constitutional, criminal, civil, and administrative — before designing an engagement strategy. The comparative assessment of legal pathways across the eight Amazonian countries in Chapter III provides a useful reference for this exercise.

7. Systematic assessment of the effectiveness of government action #

The final stage of the evidence-to-accountability pipeline involves monitoring the implementation of sanctions and the outcomes of judicial decisions. Nature crime in the Amazon remains systematically underreported, under investigated and under-sentenced. Between 2018 and 2024, only 147 convictions were recorded out of 2,376 criminal investigations relating to environmental crimes in the Colombian Amazon³⁵. In Brazil, an Imazon analysis of over 3,500 lawsuits for illegal deforestation filed between 2017 and 2020 found that 78 per cent were dismissed without prejudice and only 8 per cent resulted in a ruling with liability; of the compensation and civil penalties ordered, just 0.2 per cent had been paid by December 2023.³⁶ In Ecuador, a specialized prosecutorial task force opened 2,075 investigations between 2017 and 2022, of which 87 per cent remained in the investigative phase and only around 1 per cent ended in a conviction or plea bargain.³⁷

The compilation of such statistics is crucial to assess the gap between the scale of environmental violations and the institutional capacity available to address them. This type of activity primarily supports Stage 5 (Execution of Sentences and Sanctions) of the accountability pipeline, by tracking whether rulings are actually enforced and maintaining political pressure for investment in the capacity of agencies along the entire accountability pipeline,

• CSOs, in particular in Brazil, have created dedicated platforms to organize, systematize, and make publicly accessible data on environmental enforcement and litigation. The Monitor da Fiscalização, developed by a coalition of CSOs including Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV), MapBiomas, and Brazil.IO, tracks the implementation of environmental enforcement actions and sanctions. The JusAmazônia platform, meanwhile; functions as a search and monitoring tool that compiles dispersed judicial information and extracts statistics about the resolution of cases of environmental violations. This systematic assessment often reveals that a significant proportion of cases remain unresolved, reflecting structural limitations in the ability of State systems to process the volume and complexity of environmental claims³⁸.

• By making this information accessible to journalists, researchers, and policymakers, CSOs increase transparency and generate public pressure for stronger accountability for Nature crime. This systematic assessment is critical to “close the loop” of civil society contributions to the pipeline. Going back to the first type of contribution “Advocacy for the prioritization of Nature crime, this type of information can be used in advocacy campaigns to argue for allocation of resources commensurate with the scale of the challenge presented by Nature crime.

Conducting this type of systematic assessment presents a number of challenges:

• In many Amazonian countries, information on inspections, sanctions, fines, embargoes, and judicial cases is dispersed across multiple institutional databases or is simply not publicly available, making this type of systematic assessment difficult.

• Even when data can be accessed about judicial cases, there may still be a significant gap between judicial decisions and implementation. When courts issue rulings or administrative sanctions are applied by environmental agencies, there is often limited transparency regarding whether fines are actually paid, illegal activities are halted, or restoration measures are implemented. This “last mile” of the accountability process is where data is the most deficient.

Instituto Democracia e Sustentabilidade (IDS), Brazil Jurimetrics as a Tool for Systemic Accountability JusAmazônia, a platform developed by the Instituto Democracia e Sustentabilidade (IDS), applies jurimetric analysis to environmental litigation across the Brazilian Amazon, producing the kind of systemic diagnostic that neither the judiciary nor the Public Prosecutor’s Office routinely generates for itself. Drawing on a database of nearly 17,000 public civil actions sourced from state courts and the Federal Regional Court, the platform tracks cases involving deforestation from filing through to sentencing. An analysis of over 3,500 cases filed under the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Amazônia Protege programme found that only 7% of all cases filed resulted in a conviction, with the total monetary value of 51 condemnatory sentences amounting to R$4 million, a figure the platform’s researchers describe as negligible relative to the scale of harm. These findings have been presented to the Supreme Court, the National Justice Council, and the Ministry of Justice, generating institutional interest.

Recommendations #

• Design transparency platforms with non-specialist audiences in mind, including journalists, policymakers, and affected communities. Data on enforcement gaps that is accessible and legible to these audiences is far more likely to generate political pressure than technically rigorous reports.

• Coordinate with regional networks to produce cross-country comparisons. These are more effective at exposing structural gaps than national reports in isolation, and harder for individual governments to dismiss as exceptional or anomalous, turning national data into a regional accountability story.

• Frame findings around accountability gaps rather than just violations, shifting the narrative from documenting harm to assessing whether institutions are functioning. This framing tends to resonate more strongly with policymakers and international audiences, and positions CSOs as governance monitors rather than adversaries.

Conclusion and recommendations #

In a region where State capacity is often uneven or constrained by political volatility, CSOs can transform dispersed observations of environmental harm into legally actionable evidence and maintain pressure on institutional mechanisms to ensure that perpetrators of Nature crime are held accountable. These contributions of civil society are spread across the whole arc of government response. Taken as a group, civil society can be seen as an intelligence hub, working hand-in-hand with environmental agencies and public prosecutors to ensure that State authorities possess the evidentiary basis to initiate investigations.

The evidence gathered for this chapter points to a consistent distributional imbalance across the accountability pipeline. Civil society efforts are most concentrated at the detection and monitoring stage, reflecting both the relative accessibility of remote sensing tools and the long tradition of territorial surveillance among Amazonian CSOs. Capacity thins progressively toward the later stages: legality analysis, evidence-sharing with prosecutors, and above all the systematic tracking of enforcement outcomes remain chronically underfunded and understaffed. The gap is sharpest in the translation of monitoring data into judicially usable evidence — a function that requires legal expertise, institutional relationships, and procedural knowledge that most organizations lack. A pipeline in which the detection end is well-resourced, but the accountability end is thin will generate awareness without generating accountability.

Significant challenges remain: the mismatch between short-term project funding and the long-term nature required for territorial monitoring often limits the sustained impact of civil society efforts. Furthermore, the translation of technical evidence into judicial action is frequently hindered by institutional bottlenecks, a lack of specialized knowledge among judges, and persistent opacity regarding government enforcement data in certain national contexts. Ultimately, given the exclusive nature of criminal prosecution as a prerogative of the State, these bottlenecks of government capacity set a limit on the effectiveness of civil society efforts, no matter how skilled and well-funded (see also Chapter III)

Accountability for Nature crime in the Amazon is unlikely to be achieved through State action alone, nor can it rely on isolated organizational efforts. It demands a highly articulated, well-resourced, and technically proficient civil society network, working in strategic complementarity with State institutions – and supported by donors and governments who understand the long-term, structural nature of this work.

The following nine recommendations are designed to function as an operational guide for CSOs, governments, donors, and enforcement agencies seeking to strengthen the accountability pipeline. They are grounded in the practices, strategies, and lessons documented throughout this chapter, and are intended to translate the analytical findings into concrete actions that can inform policy, programming, and investment decisions. Further recommendations for governments on how to collaborate better with civil society are listed in Chapter III of this study.

1. Establish secure, interoperable data-sharing platforms across borders

Nature crime does not respect national borders, yet civil society responses remain predominantly organized at the national level. Cross-border data alliances, such as AARIMO, MAAP, MapBiomas Amazonia, and Amazon Mining Watch, already demonstrate the value of shared methodologies and interoperable databases, and should serve as models for expansion.

• CSOs should actively seek to join or contribute to existing regional data alliances rather than building independent infrastructure, pooling monitoring assets to generate a more comprehensive and resilient picture of cross-border violations.

• Governments should create enabling conditions for cross-border civil society data exchange, including by recognizing the legal standing of CSO-generated evidence produced in partner countries, and by integrating CSO monitoring outputs into mechanisms such as ACTO’s Public Safety Commission and the Amazon International Police Cooperation Centre (CCPI).

• Donors should prioritize multi-country grants that fund shared data infrastructure, recognizing that network-level investment yields greater coverage and resilience than funding isolated organizational capacity. The funds should be for larger periods, as funded projects of 2 or 3 years are not enough to maintain large projects.

2. Institutionalize the admissibility of technical and spatial evidence from civil society sources

CSO-generated satellite imagery, geospatial analysis, and remote sensing data remain legally uncertain in many Amazonian jurisdictions, limiting their usability in formal proceedings even when their technical quality is high.

• CSOs should align their evidence-gathering methodologies with the specific evidentiary standards required by prosecutors and judges in each national context, drawing on successful models such as the technical cooperation between FEMA and civil society in Peru, and the Mining Impacts Calculator developed by CSF, which has been adapted for use across nearly all Amazonian countries.

• Governments and judicial authorities should establish clear, standardized protocols for the admissibility of CSO-generated technical evidence, and invest in training prosecutors and judges on how to interpret and apply spatial and environmental data in legal proceedings.

• Donors should fund the development of court-ready documentation templates and the legal consultancy needed to help CSOs adapt their outputs to jurisdictional requirements across the region.

3. Mandate public transparency of government enforcement and concession data

Independent monitoring and benchmarking are only as strong as the public data they can cross-reference. In many Amazonian countries, registries of land tenure, mining concessions, environmental permits, fines, and embargoes remain incomplete, outdated, or inaccessible.

• CSOs should continue to develop transparency platforms that cross-reference monitoring alerts with available public data to identify indications of illegality, and should use freedom of information mechanisms and litigation for data access where proactive disclosure is withheld.

• Governments should ensure that concession registries, permit databases, and enforcement records are comprehensive, up-to-date, and publicly accessible – an obligation that is consistent with commitments under the Escazú Agreement for signatory States.

• Donors should support CSOs in building analytical independence from official data systems, funding alternative methodologies, including remote sensing and cross-referencing of publicly available sources, that reduce dependence on government cooperation that may not be forthcoming.

4. Foster technical cooperation agreements between CSOs and law enforcement

The gap between detection and investigation is one of the most persistent bottlenecks in the accountability pipeline. Formal cooperation frameworks between CSOs and State investigative bodies are among the most effective tools for bridging it.

• CSOs should pursue formal memoranda of understanding with Public Prosecutor’s Offices and environmental enforcement agencies, following models such as FCDS’ MoU with the Fiscalía in Colombia, covering the provision of satellite imagery, overflight data, and technical evidence dossiers, and ACCA’s formal integration into Peru’s national detection and response system.

• Governments should create legal and institutional frameworks that recognize CSOs as formal technical partners in investigations, including by developing anonymized cooperation pathways that allow organizations to share evidence without being publicly identified as the source, a critical safeguard in contexts where investigated actors have the means to retaliate.

• Donors should fund not only the technical tools CSOs use to produce evidence, but also the relationship-building work needed to establish and maintain cooperation with prosecutorial institutions – through joint workshops, multi-year engagement grants, and support for coordination costs.

5. Develop and fund long-term litigation and legal support mechanisms

Strategic litigation is one of the most powerful tools available to civil society, but its high cost and long duration place it beyond the reach of most organizations operating in the Amazon.

• CSOs should identify cases where prior monitoring and documentation involvement positions them as credible contributors to litigation, and should map past cases with positive outcomes to extract replicable legal strategies. Participation as amicus curiae or technical expert, rather than lead litigant, offers a lower-cost entry point that maximizes impact without requiring organizations to absorb the full burden of legal proceedings.

• Governments should ensure that legal frameworks in each country allow for CSO participation in environmental litigation, including as amicus curiae, and should create dedicated environmental courts or specialized chambers where these cases can be heard by judges with relevant expertise.

• Donors should fund training programs that build CSO capacity to navigate both national legal routes and international mechanisms such as the IACHR, ensuring that organizations are aware of and able to access the full range of available legal pathways before they are needed. Donors should also consider funding structures that allow for multi-year legislative engagement. Short funding cycles are particularly damaging at this stage because legal reform depends on accumulated relationships and institutional trust that cannot be rebuilt quickly, and organisations that disappear between funding rounds lose access that takes years to rebuild.

6. Expand specialized capacity-building for judicial and administrative operators

Even where strong evidence exists and formal cooperation mechanisms are in place, cases frequently stall at the adjudication stage due to a lack of judicial and prosecutorial capacity to interpret complex environmental, spatial, and financial data.

• CSOs should expand their role in training judges, prosecutors, and environmental police, moving beyond basic environmental law to cover the mechanics of transnational organized crime, commodity laundering, and the interpretation of geospatial and financial evidence. The Mining Impacts Calculator, developed by CSF and adapted across nearly all Amazonian countries, is a model for how CSO-developed tools can become embedded in judicial practice.

• Governments should institutionalize environmental crime capacity-building as a recurring component of judicial and prosecutorial training, rather than a one-off intervention dependent on CSO or donor initiative.

• Donors should fund the development and adaptation of technical tools, such as damage quantification models, geospatial evidence monitoring, and legal translation guides, that CSOs can deploy repeatedly across jurisdictions, reducing the cost of each individual capacity-building intervention and allowing organizations to scale their impact. Donors should also fund dedicated communications capacity within CSOs — including staff, tools, and training — recognizing that evidence which never reaches the public has limited accountability impact, yet communications functions are consistently treated as overhead rather than as core programmatic work.

7. Address environmental defenders’ safety through institutional protection and adaptive civil society strategies

The documentation of environmental crimes carries severe security risks. Without adequate protection, the accountability pipeline loses its most essential actors.

• CSOs should develop internal security protocols, including encrypted communications, chain-of-information structures that shield field monitors from direct attribution, and collective publication strategies that distribute reputational risk across multiple organizations. In politically hostile environments, operating through coalitions or academic networks can maintain pressure for accountability while reducing direct exposure.

• Governments should strengthen State protection protocols for environmental defenders, recognize the specific criminal nature of violence against them, and create legal frameworks, including confidential informant status for CSOs in high-risk contexts, that allow organizations to cooperate with authorities without placing their staff or partners at risk.

• Donors should treat security budgets as non-negotiable line items in CSO grants, allowing for flexible allocations dedicated specifically to the physical and digital security of field researchers, community leaders and overall staff. This should be seen as a step in the due diligence process of granting a dedicated fund for environmental defenders in the region.

8. Track sentencing and the execution of sanctions to close the accountability loop #

Generating evidence and securing legal judgments are insufficient if sanctions are not enforced. The final stage of the pipeline, execution of sentences and compliance monitoring, remains the least resourced and least documented in the region.

• CSOs should dedicate resources to systematically tracking the implementation of judicial rulings and administrative penalties, building on models such as Monitor da Fiscalização and JusAmazônia in Brazil, and working to adapt these approaches to other Amazonian countries.

• Governments should establish open reporting mechanisms on the enforcement of environmental sanctions, making compliance data publicly available so that CSOs and citizens can independently verify whether rulings are being implemented.

• Donors should prioritize initiatives that monitor compliance and publicly highlight implementation gaps, recognizing that the deterrent effect of the entire accountability pipeline depends on sanctions being visibly enforced.

9. Support trans-Amazonian civil society initiatives and Pan-Amazonian exchange platforms #

The transnational nature of environmental crime networks requires a civil society response that is equally transnational in its coordination, knowledge-sharing, and advocacy.

• CSOs should actively seek partnerships with organizations in other Amazonian countries, contributing to and drawing on shared legal strategies, monitoring approaches, and lessons from engagement with enforcement institutions. This helps reduce duplication and accelerate the spread of effective practices across the region and in specific issues CSOs aim to tackle on environmental crimes.

• Governments should encourage and formally recognize trans-Amazonian civil society collaboration, including by creating institutional spaces, within ACTO and other regional bodies, where CSO findings can be presented, discussed, and integrated into intergovernmental enforcement strategies.

• Donors should fund projects that include CSOs from more than one Amazonian country, and should resource dedicated Pan-Amazonian exchange platforms that enable regular consultation among organizations across all eight Amazonian countries, treating regional coordination as a programmatic priority rather than an add-on.

Annex I. Detailed methodology #

Survey #

To map the landscape of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) operating across the eight Amazonian countries, an initial desk-based mapping was conducted using the Amazon Conservation Association’s (ACA) existing regional network. This step aimed to identify active organizations and ensure broad geographic coverage. Building on this preliminary mapping, a structured survey was designed to systematically collect comparable information on CSOs engaged in the prevention, monitoring, and response to nature-related crimes. The survey was disseminated through ACA’s partner networks and publicly shared via ACA’s social media channels to reach both long-standing partners and organizations outside ACA’s immediate network.

The questionnaire comprised 56 questions organized into seven thematic sections. Section 1 captured core organizational characteristics, including countries and regions of operation, year of establishment, organizational size, principal areas of work, and legal status. Section 2 focused on the organization’s engagement with nature-related crimes, identifying the types of crimes addressed, primary intervention approaches, and the data collection tools and methodologies employed. Section 3 examined data use, with questions aimed at understanding whether and how organizations collect data on environmental crimes and the purposes for which such data is used, including advocacy, litigation, or policy engagement.

Sections 4 and 5 addressed legal capacity, covering organizational access to legal representation, prior involvement in legal actions, and the availability of internal or external legal support and training. Section 6 explored the main operational, institutional, and contextual challenges faced by CSOs working on environmental crime. Finally, Section 7 examined participation in partnerships, networks, and collaborative initiatives, with a view to understanding coordination dynamics and opportunities for collective action across the region.

The survey followed a non-probabilistic sampling approach and was distributed through existing professional and organizational networks. As such, the findings are not intended to be statistically representative of all CSOs operating in the Amazon region, but rather to provide an indicative and exploratory overview of organizational profiles, capacities, and challenges among active organizations working on nature-related crimes.

In total, 41 responses were collected from CSOs with operations spanning all eight Amazonian countries. Survey data was analyzed descriptively to identify recurring patterns and gaps, and responses were treated in aggregate to avoid attribution of sensitive information.

Interviews #

Following the survey phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a selected group of CSOs to deepen and contextualize the findings. From the 41 organizations that responded to the survey, 10 were selected for this second phase based on their affirmative response to having engaged in legal actions related to environmental or nature-related crimes at the national, regional, or international level. This selection criterion aimed to capture more detailed insights into legal strategies, institutional interactions, and implementation challenges.

In addition, a limited number of interviewees who did not fall within the initial group of ten organizations were included to ensure representation across all Amazonian countries. These additional interviewees were selected from the Amazon Conservation Association’s partner network.

The semi-structured format combined a common set of 24 guiding questions with the flexibility to explore issues raised by interviewees in greater depth or to refrain from asking some questions in the cases they were not relevant for the interviewee. This approach ensured comparability across interviews while accommodating variation in organizational mandates, national contexts, and types of legal engagement.

Interviews focused on topics including organizational experience with litigation and legal complaints, interactions with judicial and administrative authorities, barriers to legal action, enforcement dynamics, perceptions of the effectiveness of existing legal and policy frameworks, and governmental relationship with CSOs in the interviewee country.

List of CSOs interviewed #

La Alianza Amazónica para la Reducción de los Impactos de la Minería de Oro (AARIMO)	Colombia
Conservación Amazónica (ACCA)	Peru
Fundación para la Conservación y el Desarrollo (FCDS)	Colombia Peru
Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (DAR)	Peru
Conservación Amazónica (ACEAA)	Bolívia
Grupo Interinstitucional de Trabajo en Oro Responsable (GIT-OR)	Bolívia
Amazon Conservation Team (ACT)	Guyana and Suriname
EcoCiencia	Ecuador
Fundación Rio Napo	Ecuador
Instituto Centro Vida (ICV)	Brasil
Instituto de Desenvolvimento Social (ISD)	Brasil
Instituto Igarapé	Brasil
Instituto Socioambiental (ISA)	Brasil
Grupo de Trabajo Indígena (Universidad de los Andes)	Venezuela
SOS Orinoco	Venezuela

List of respondents to the survey #

Alianza Amazónica para la Reducción de los Impactos de la Minería de Oro (AARIMO)
Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV)
Fundación Ecuatoriana de Estudios Ecológicos – EcoCiencia
Conservación Amazonica-ACEAA
Earth Genome
World Wildlife Fund- WWF Ecuador
SOSOrinoco
Instituto Socioambiental (ISA)
Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) – Peru
Sociedad Boliviana de Derecho Ambiental (SBDA)
Amazon Rainforest Conservancy (ARC) is the registered Canadian charity working in partnership with two Peruvian non-profit sister organizations: Amazon Rainforest Conservancy Northern Peru (ARCNP) and Peruvian Amazon Rainforest Conservancy (PARC).
Clima21
Asociación COLNODO
Ada associação dos trabalhadores rurais Deus é amor região da taboca.
Biome Conservation (International Conservation Fund of Canada)
Fundación Rio Napo
Asociación Civil Centro de Capacitación y Gestión Comunitaria La Cosecha.
Camara de Mineria del Ecuador
Guardianes del Bosque
Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA)
Programa de Promoción de los Derechos Indígenas en Venezuela “Wayamoutheri”
Conservación Amazónica – ACCA
Grupo de Trabajo sobre Asuntos Indígenas (GTAI) Universidad de Los Andes
Amazon Conservation Team (ACT)
Observatório do Código Florestal
Proética- Peruvian Chapter of Transparency International
SOS Amazônia
Conservation Strategy Fund (CSF)
Observatório BR-319
Fundación Natura Colombia
Universidad Católica Andrés Bello
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
Fundación para la Conservación y el Desarrollo Sustentable (FCDS)
Gaia Amazonas
Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (DAR)
Wildlife Conservation Society Programa Ecuador
Amazon Conservation Team Guianas
South Rupununi Conservation Society
Red CORAL (Red de monitoreo y análisis del Crimen Organizado en América Latina)
Kanuku Mountains Community Representative Group
Amazon Underworld

Annex II. Directory of examples of civil society contributions #

Notes #

1. “The definition of “environmental crime” is not universally agreed, but it is often understood as a collective term to describe illegal activities harming the environment and aimed at benefitting individuals or groups our companies from the exploitation of, damage to, trade of thought of natural resources, including serious crimes and transnational organized crime.” More information in: Henriksen, R., Kreilhuber, A., Stewart, D., Kotsovou, M., Raxter, P., Mrema, E., and Barrat, S. (Eds). 2016. The Rise of Environ mental Crime – A Growing Threat To Natural Resources Peace, Development And Security. A UNEPINTERPOL Rapid Response Assessment. United Nations Environment Programme and RHIPTO Rapid Response–Norwegian Center for Global Analyses, www.rhipto.org-

2. Barber, C. V., K. Winfield, and Y. Aspinall. People. Planet. Justice. Understanding and countering Nature crime. Report. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. 2024. Available online at doi.org/10.46830/wrirpt.22.00038.

3. Funari, Gabriel; Cote, María Antonia; Aponte, Andrés; Ríos, Lina María Asprilla. Environmental crimes in the Amazon: current trends and rising threats. Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2025. Available at: https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/environmental-crimes-in-the-amazon/

4. Waisbich, L. T., Risso, M., Husek, T., & Brasil, L. (2022). The ecosystem of environmental crime in the Amazon: An analysis of illicit rainforest economies in Brazil. Strategic Paper 55. Instituto Igarapé. Available at: igarape.org.br.

5. Igarapé Institute. Strategies to combat environmental crimes and associated money laundering. 2026.

6. InSight Crime. El crimen organizado saca provecho del récord en los precios del oro. 2025. Available at: https://insightcrime.org/es/noticias/crimen-organizado-saca-provecho-record-precios-oro/

7. Igarapé Institute; Insight Crime. La Amazonía Saqueada: las raíces de los delitos ambientales en cinco países. 2021.

8. InSight Crime. Beneath the Surface of Timber Trafficking on the Peru-Colombia-Brasil Border. 2023. Available at: https://insightcrime.org/investigations/beneath-surface-timber-trafficking-peru-colombia-brazil-border/

9. World Resources Institute. Crimen organizado en el Amazonas: una amenaza creciente para la selva tropical más grande del mundo. Available at:
   https://es.wri.org/insights/crimen-organizado-en-el-amazonas-una-amenaza-creciente-para-la-selva-tropical-mas-grande

10. World Resources Institute. Crimen organizado en el Amazonas: una amenaza creciente para la selva tropical más grande del mundo. 2025. Available at: https://insightcrime.org/es/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/InsightCrime-Tri-Border-ES.pdf.

11. Pacheco, Andrea; Meyer, Carsten. Land tenure drives Brazil’s deforestation rates across socio-environmental contexts. nature Communications. Vol. 13. 2022.

12. Reydon, B.; Molendijk, M.; Porras, N.; Siqueira, G. The Amazon Forest Preservation by Clarifying Property Rights and Potential Conflicts: How Experiments Using Fit-for-Purpose Can Help. Land. Vol 10. 2021.

13. Cárdenas, Juan Diego; Ramírez, María Fernanda; Robbins, Seth. Challenges and Opportunities in Protecting Amazon Tri-Border Regions. InSight Crime. 2023. Available at: https://insightcrime.org/investigations/challenges-opportunities-protecting-amazon-tri-border-regions/

14. USAID. Corrupción en la Minería Artesanal y de Pequeña Escala en la Amazonía Peruana. 2022.

15. Igarapé Institute. Strengthening Anti-Money Laundering Systems Against Environmental Crime: Comparative Legal and Policy Frameworks in Amazonian Countries. 2025.

16. InSight Crime; Instituto Igarapé. La Amazonía Saqueada: las raíces de los delitos ambientales en las regiones de triple frontera. 2023. Available at: https://insightcrime.org/es/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/InsightCrime-Tri-Border-ES.pdf

17. Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Amazon Underworld: criminal economies in the world’s largest rainforest. 2023. Available in: https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/amazon-underworld-economias-criminales/#:~:text=Criminal%20economies%20in%20the%20world‘s,to%20reorganize%20and%20take%20over.

18. Igarapé Institute; InSight Crime. Stolen Amazon: the roots of environmental crime in five countries. 2022. Available at: https://igarape.org.br/en/stolen-amazon-the-roots-of-environmental-crime-in-five-countries/

19. “Amicus Curiae literally translated from Latin is “friend of the court.” It is referencing a person or group who is not a party to an action, but has a strong interest in the matter. This person or group will petition the court for permission to submit a brief in the action intending to influence the court’s decision” More information available at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/amicus_curiae

20. Killeen, Timothy J. In the Amazon, lack of transparency and corruption undermine the environment. Mongabay. 2025. Available at: https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/in-the-amazon-lack-of-transparency-and-corruption-undermine-the-environment/

21. More details on the methodology can be found in Annex IV.

22. Waisbich, L. T., Risso, M., Husek, T., & Brasil, L. (2022). The ecosystem of environmental crime in the Amazon: An analysis of illicit rainforest economies in Brazil. Strategic Paper 55. Instituto Igarapé. Available at: igarape.org.br.

23. A further list of examples and materials, organized by contribution type, can also be found in Annex II.

24. SPDA. Cinco puntos que debe tener en cuenta el Congreso sobre la incorporación del tráfico de vida silvestre dentro de la Ley contra el crimen organizado Opinión legal. 2021. Available at: https://spda.org.pe/publicacion/cinco-puntos-que-debe-tener-en-cuenta-el-congreso-sobre-la-incorporacion-del-trafico-de-vida-silvestre-dentro-de-la-ley-contra-el-crimen-organizado-opinion-legal/.

25. La Alianza Amazónica para la Reducción de los Impactos de la Minería de Oro

26. The terms “Nature crime” and “environmental violation” are used distinctly throughout this report. “Nature crime” refers specifically to acts that constitute criminal offences under domestic law and are subject to criminal sanctions such as fines or imprisonment. “Environmental violation,” by contrast, is a broader category that encompasses any breach of environmental regulations, including administrative infractions that may not rise to the threshold of criminal liability but nonetheless trigger regulatory responses such as administrative penalties, permit revocations, or remediation orders. Monitoring and detection activities by CSOs may identify both types of breach; the subsequent accountability pathway (criminal prosecution or administrative enforcement) will depend on the legal classification of the act in each national jurisdiction. For more information, see Chapter III.

27. Remote sensing technologies refer to methods of collecting data about the Earth’s surface from a distance, typically through satellite imagery, aerial photography, or drone-based sensors. In the context of environmental monitoring, these tools are used to detect changes in land cover, identify deforestation, map mining activity, and track other forms of environmental degradation without requiring physical presence in the field. Commonly used platforms include Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 (European Space Agency), Landsat (NASA/USGS), and commercial high-resolution imagery providers, as well as processed alert systems such as Global Forest Watch and MapBiomas that build analytical layers on top of raw satellite data.

28. The specific admissibility of remote sensing evidence in each of the eight countries of the Amazon is explored in greater detail in Chapter III.

29. Center for Climate Crisis Analysis. Fighting illegal deforestation And Its Drivers In Peru. https://climatecrimeanalysis.org/project/fighting-illegal-deforestation-caused-by-palm-oil-in-peru/. 2022.

30. Conservation Strategy Fund. Mining Impacts Calculator. Available at: https://miningcalculator.conservation-strategy.org/

31. Conservation Strategy Fund. CSF’s Mining Calculator Makes an Impact on the Ground. 2023. Available at: https://www.conservation-strategy.org/news/csfs-mining-calculator-makes-impact-ground.

32. Instituto SocioAmbiental. Yanomami sob ataque: garimpo ilegal na Terra Indígena Yanomami e propostas para combatê-lo. 2021. Available at: Yanomami sob ataque: garimpo ilegal na Terra Indígena Yanomami e propostas para combatê-lo.

33. Amazon Conservation. (2026). Keeping the Rivers Flowing – How Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon Threatens Rainfall in Peru and Bolivia. Available at: https://www.amazonconservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/EN_Flying-Rivers-1.pdf

34. Majundar, Roshni. Brazil revives plan to pave highway through Amazon. DW News. 2026. Available at: https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-revives-plan-to-pave-highway-through-amazon/a-77321412

35. Ministerio de Justicia y del Derecho and others, “Informe estadístico sobre delitos ambientales en Colombia (2018-2024)” (2025) available at: https://repositorio.minjusticia.gov.co/politica-criminal/Biblioteca/Informe%20estadistico%20Delitos%20Ambientales%20%282018-2024%29.pdf.

36. Almeida, J., Brito, B., & Farias, H. (2022). Are courts punishing illegal deforesters in the Brazilian Amazon? Results of the Amazônia Protege program — executive summary. Imazon. https://imazon.fly.storage.tigris.dev/wp-backup/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Executive-Summary-Amazonia-Protege.pdf

37. https://news.mongabay.com/2025/10/the-rise-of-anti-corruption-prosecutors-in-the-amazon-region/

38. Moraes, Vitor Hugo S. O Poder Judiciário no combate ao desmatamento e reparação de danos ambientais e climáticos. São Paulo : Instituto Democracia e Sustentabilidade. 2025. (Projeto JusAmazônia). Available at: https://www.idsbrasil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Resultados-e-aprendizados-do-uso-da-jurimetria_SEM-HIFENIZACAO.pdf.