Executive Summary

Published: August 19, 2026

Overview #

“Confronting Nature Crime in the Amazon” is a three-part study of Nature crime across eight countries of the Amazon basin — Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela –. It examines how environmental crimes and associated human rights abuses including illegal deforestation, illegal logging, illegal mining, mercury pollution, and violence against environmental defenders can be detected, documented, and ultimately sanctioned, and what role civil society plays in supporting government accountability efforts where State capacity is limited. The study’s findings are presented across three chapters:

Chapter I — Towards an Amazon Nature crime Atlas assesses whether the data exist to monitor Nature crime consistently across the basin.
Chapter II — Amazonian civil society in the fight against Nature crime maps how civil society organisations (CSOs) already contribute to government accountability efforts.
Chapter III — Enabling conditions for government engagement on Nature crime assesses the legal and institutional conditions that enable, or obstruct, that contribution in each country.

The three chapters approach the accountability of Nature crime in the Amazon from different angles. Chapter I establishes the evidential foundation: before civil society or the State can act, the harm must be visible. Chapter II takes that foundation and asks what organised civil society does with it. Chapter III then explores how civil society’s contribution is able to engage the government and produce accountability outcomes.

Taken together, the three chapters come to a single conclusion: Amazonian countries have developed a considerable capacity to detect Nature crime, but that capacity does not guarantee accountability. The gap between the two reflects an under-resourced civil society operating unevenly across the “evidence-to-accountability pipeline”, in an enabling environment that differs sharply across borders and is under active pressure in several countries. Closing that gap requires working simultaneously on all three dimensions: better and more interoperable data, stronger civil society presence at the accountability end of the pipeline, and deliberate investment in the legal and institutional conditions that allow that presence to translate into enforcement.

Main findings for each chapter #

Chapter I — Towards an Amazon Nature crime Atlas #

This chapter reviews the data available across eight countries for five observable manifestations of Nature crime: illegal deforestation, illegal logging, illegal artisanal and small-scale gold mining, mercury pollution, and violence against environmental defenders. Six findings stand out:

The five manifestations reviewed share a common geography and are often linked to the same criminal networks. Yet they are monitored through separate systems and at different intervals, and the resulting data coverage depends more on countries’ institutional capacity to detect, document, and report these activities than on the actual scale or severity of Nature crime.
Varying capacities for detection of potential Nature crime across Amazonian countries obscures the relative scale of the issue. The fact that more data is available in Peru, Brazil or Colombia doesn’t mean that Nature crime is more widespread in these countries. Venezuela combines the most acute mining-driven destruction with the least reliable data, and Bolivia and Guyana sit in a similar blind spot.
Criminal networks operate across borders, but every national dataset stops at the border. The pan-Amazonian data that does exist is produced largely by civil society (MapBiomas Amazonia, RAISG, Amazon Mining Watch, Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program), not by governments.
Detection of potential manifestation of nature crimes has improved substantially across the region, thanks to civil society-driven, pan-Amazonian platforms such as MAAP, Mapbiomas and Amazon Mining Watch. The primary constraint is to determine whether a detected activity is legal or illegal. Establishing that an observed harm is unlawful requires up-to-date maps of protected areas, territories, concessions and authorisations that exist only partially, and recurring overlay analysis.
The priority is no longer improving detection, but consolidating pan-Amazonian data layers that can be used for legality assessments for different potential manifestations of Nature crime and provide evidence for coordinated, transboundary operations.
Civil society data alliances currently make up for the absence of official pan-Amazonian datasets built on cooperation from national authorities. These alliances need stable cross-border mandates and funding to maintain the basin-wide picture that no single national system provides.

Chapter II — Amazonian civil society in the fight against Nature Crime #

Drawing on a survey of 41 CSOs and 16 interviews across the eight countries, Chapter II maps how civil society supports the “evidence-to-accountability pipeline”, the process by which government authorities establish accountability for Nature crime, moving from detection to investigation, prosecution, judgement and application of eventual sanctions. The following findings stand out:

The chapter identifies seven distinct types of contributions through which civil society supports accountability: (i) advocacy to prioritise the agenda, (ii) independent monitoring and detection, (iii) legality analysis, (iv) evidence-sharing with prosecutors, (v) public pressure campaigns, (vi) participation in judicial proceedings, and (vii) systematic assessment of enforcement effectiveness.
Survey results reveal that contributions are concentrated at the detection end of the pipeline and thins progressively toward the accountability end. Legality analysis, the translation of monitoring into judicially usable evidence, and the tracking of enforcement outcomes tend to be under-resourced. The result is a pipeline that tends to generate awareness without producing sanctions.
CSOs, governments and donors should reorient investment toward legality analysis, formalised cooperation with prosecutors, strategic litigation capacity and systematic enforcement monitoring — areas where civil society effort is currently weaker and where returns in terms of accountability would be higher.
Promoting accountability requires connecting civil society’s detection capacity more effectively to government enforcement. Key strategies include strengthening legality analysis, converting monitoring findings into evidence that can be used in investigations and judicial proceedings, formalising cooperation between CSOs and prosecutors, expanding strategic litigation capacity, and systematically tracking investigations, judgments and sanctions.

Chapter III — Enabling conditions for government engagement on Nature crime #

Developed with the International Lawyers Project, Chapter III compares the conditions for civil society engagement in eight Amazonian countries, across five dimensions: (i) civil society status, (ii) institutional landscape, (iii) legal pathways, (iv) admissibility of remote sensing evidence, and (v) challenges in engagement. The main findings from this comparative analysis are:

Implementation of the Escazú Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean is bearing fruit — signatory countries show better enabling conditions for civil society.
As levels of violence against environmental defenders remain high across the Amazon, the safety of environmental defenders is the most critical gap in enabling conditions for civil society action, with six out of eight countries classified as challenging.
The highest-return interventions are changes in the law, but also conditions surrounding the law: ratification and active implementation of the Escazú Agreement, formalised cooperation protocols between CSOs and prosecutors that reduce dependence on individual relationships, dedicated statutory frameworks for the admissibility of remote-sensing evidence, and stronger measures dedicated to environmental defender protection.
Rights-of-nature doctrine can widen standing of CSOs wanting to promote accountability for Nature crime, but its effectiveness remains limited by low capacity to enforce the sanctions it underpins.
Remote sensing evidence, a crucial tool for civil society to trigger enforcement from authorities, is admitted in all eight countries but protected by a dedicated statute in none. This leaves admissibility dependent on fragile practice and exposed to legislative rollback.

Cross-cutting conclusions and recommendations #

The main bottleneck in addressing nature crime is no longer detection, but converting evidence into accountability. Decades of investment in satellite monitoring and alert systems has made detection comparatively strong. Approaching from different angles, each chapter finds that the constraint now lies further along the accountability pipeline: Chapter I identifies legality assessment — matching an observed harm to authoritative maps of what is permitted — as the principal data gap; Chapter II finds legality analysis, prosecutorial evidence-sharing and enforcement tracking to be the most overlooked contributions; and Chapter III finds evidence admissibility and compliance with rulings to be the most fragile legal points. The marginal return on additional detection capacity is now low; the unmet need is concentrated in the legality-to-enforcement segment.
Regional accountability is only as strong as the countries in which data, civil society capacity and enabling legal conditions are weakest. The countries where Chapter I finds the data thinnest — Venezuela, and to a lesser degree Bolivia and Guyana — are also where Chapter II finds civil society capacity weakest and where Chapter III records the least favourable enabling conditions. Weak data, weak civil society and a weak legal environment compound one another: a case cannot be built where there is no baseline data, no admissibility practice, and no protection for those who gather it. The consequences extend beyond these countries. Criminal networks operating across the basin can route activity through the jurisdictions where detection is weakest and prosecution least likely, which means that overall regional accountability is only as strong as its most compromised node. Leveling up the countries with the widest gaps is therefore a functional priority: a regional accountability architecture with blind spots in some countries will remain exploitable regardless of how strong it is in other countries.
Nature crime is transboundary, but every layer of the response remains predominantly national. The chapters reveal the same limitation: monitoring datasets stop at the border, civil society responses are organised nationally, and enforcement and most legal pathways remain domestic, with regional frameworks still nascent. The missing element is stronger coordination and regional integration mechanisms for civil society, connected to regional government cooperation efforts.

In that context, the creation of the CESPIT (ACTO’s public safety commission) and the CCPI (the Amazon International Police Cooperation Centre) opens a new institutional channel for translating civil society monitoring into intergovernmental enforcement action. As of 2026, both mechanisms are nascent, and the modalities for engaging civil society have not yet been defined, which makes this an important moment to establish norms before practice hardens in their absence.

Chapter I’s central finding that no consolidated, cross-country official dataset on Nature crime exists, points to a precise role for the CESPIT:

Recognise and coordinate the pan-Amazonian civil society monitoring platforms (MAAP, MapBiomas Amazonia, RAISG, Amazon Mining Watch) as standing technical contributors to the regional security agenda, giving their data a formal channel into intergovernmental deliberation rather than relying on country-by-country relationships.
Broker intergovernmental agreement on the acceptability of CSO-generated data. The establishment of shared standard and protocols for quality, provenance and methodology that member states are willing to treat as reliable inputs. In the absence of consolidated official datasets, an intergovernmental endorsement of common civil-society data standards is the fastest route to a shared evidentiary baseline across the eight countries.
Embed those standards and channels into the action plans and operational instruments the Commission is currently developing, so the link between independent monitoring and government action is built into regional policy.
These measures would also address a long-standing criticism that ACTO has not allowed the effective participation of civil society, and would align the Commission’s practice with member states’ transparency obligations under the Escazú Agreement.

Engaging the CCPI — operational evidence pathways, with safeguards. As the body that can actually act on Nature crime, the CCPI is the natural operational endpoint for civil-society evidence. Its role could be enhanced by the following measures:

Establish structured, secure referral channels through which civil society monitoring outputs (geospatial alerts, mining and deforestation mapping, chain-of-custody documentation) can enter the Centre’s intelligence and investigative workflows, building on the admissibility and cooperation practices identified in Chapter II.
Design those channels to protect the organisations and individuals involved. Anonymised or intermediated referral, clear limits on attribution, and safeguards against the reverse flow of police intelligence being used to surveil defenders, addressing the defender-safety gap identified in Chapter III.
Prioritize both the CCPI’s investigative coordination and the CESPIT’s agenda toward the weakest nodes (Venezuela, Bolivia and Guyana) since criminal networks route activity through the jurisdictions where detection and prosecution are weakest, and infrastructure that concentrates on the already-strong jurisdictions leaves the regional system exploitable.

CESPIT — Special Commission on Public Security and Transboundary and Transnational Illicit Activities in the Amazon Region. Created in 2025 in Leticia, the Special Commission on Public Security and Transboundary and Transnational Illicit Activities in the Amazon Region (CESPIT) represents a strategic step forward in Amazon cooperation by placing public security and the fight against environmental crimes at the center of regional action. It is one of ACTO’s special commissions, created in line with the Belém Declaration of 2023, alongside those on environment/climate, health and science. It brings together delegations from all member countries to review and refine the operational instruments guiding joint action in the region, working on agenda-setting, action plans and norm harmonisation.

CCPI — Amazon International Police Cooperation Centre. Inaugurated in September 2025 in Manaus, it is considered a milestone in the integration of the region’s security forces and in international cooperation against transnational organized crime. Coordinated by Brazil’s Federal Police, it functions as a space of articulation among the Federal Police, the Federal Highway Police, the National Force and the security forces of the nine Legal Amazon states, plus police authorities from the pan-Amazonian countries and international bodies. It will also work alongside international policing organisations such as Interpol and Europol. Its structure includes an intelligence service, operations and logistics divisions, a video-monitoring room and a crisis cabinet, and it works on three axes — integration, fighting organized crime, and environmental protection — with emphasis on decapitalising criminal organisations and mapping the illegal production chains behind mining, logging and wildlife trafficking.

Relevance for the ASL Program #

ASL’s collective gains — protected areas created and brought under improved management, degraded land restored, emissions mitigated — are only as durable as the accountability systems that deter the illegal clearing, mining and logging that erode them. Three points are especially relevant:

ASL operates where the monitoring gaps are most acute. National projects work in and around the protected areas and Indigenous territories that Chapter I identifies as exposed to a variety of manifestations of Nature crime. Strengthening accountability for Nature crime directly protects ASL’s investments.
ASL’s implementing agencies overlap with the government counterparts of civil society identified in Chapter III. Environmental authorities such as SERNANP (Peru), the EPA (Guyana) and SBB (Suriname), among others, are the institutions whose willingness to receive CSO evidence, protect defenders and uphold evidence admissibility determines whether civil society’s contribution translates into enforcement. The study offers them an evidence base and a set of concrete, transferable practices for that cooperation.
ASL is already active in this area and is well placed to anchor a response. The programme’s regional platform, thematic working groups and convening capacity make it a natural institutional home for the coordination infrastructure that the study identifies as missing.

Next steps #

The study demonstrates that capable civil society organisations exist in all eight countries; what they lack is the infrastructure to find one another, share evidence securely across borders, access shared legal expertise, and demonstrate enforcement outcomes. A proposed follow-on programme could consist of four complementary components, as listed below:

1. Expansion of systematic assessment of enforcement outcomes beyond Brazil #

The final stage of the accountability pipeline described in Chapter II — establishing whether detections and prosecutions actually result in enforced sanctions — is systematically documented in only one country. In Brazil, two civil society platforms have built this capacity: JusAmazônia (developed by the Instituto Democracia e Sustentabilidade), which applies jurimetric analysis to nearly 17,000 environmental public civil actions, tracking each from filing through to sentencing; and Monitor da Fiscalização (a coalition including ICV and MapBiomas), which tracks whether enforcement actions and penalties are actually carried out.

Their findings — that only about 7% of cases end in conviction, and just 0.2% of ordered penalties are ever paid — have been presented to Brazil’s Supreme Court and National Justice Council and have generated genuine institutional interest in reform. On the enforcement side, the Attorney General’s Office created “AGU Recupera” in 2023 to pursue strategic environmental-recovery cases. In June 2024, the AGU filed 648 actions seeking R$1.1 billion from environmental offenders, including 616 actions for the collection of environmental fines. These initiatives represent concrete movement from diagnosis toward enforcement, although their effects on conviction rates, fine collection and compliance with judgments have yet to be systematically evaluated.¹

No data equivalent exists in Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana or Suriname, and only partial data exists in Peru, Colombia and Ecuador.

The practical consequence is that civil society across most of the basin cannot make the argument that closes the loop: it cannot show, with evidence, that enforcement is failing. This weakens advocacy for reform and the case to donors. This proposal would replicate the conditions that made the Brazilian platforms possible, in three phases:

a scoping phase assessing what enforcement data exists in each remaining country and which legal levers (freedom-of-information, judicial-transparency obligations, Escazú commitments) might compel its release;
pilot tracking platforms in two or three countries where data and organisational capacity are sufficient (Bolivia, Colombia or Peru are the most plausible starting points).
As systematic assessment capability is rolled out across the eight countries, it could culminate in a regional dashboard that aggregates the national streams into a single comparative picture, of direct relevance to the mandate of the CESPIT.

2. Amazon Nature Crime Network Hub #

Capable organisations exist in every Amazon country but cannot easily find one another, route evidence across borders, or draw on shared legal expertise. The proposed Amazon Nature Crime Network Hub would address this through three different components:

A directory component provides a searchable, continuously updated registry of civil society organisations working on Nature crime, indexed by organisation, by country and subnational area of operation, and by where they sit in the accountability pipeline (advocacy, monitoring, legality analysis, evidence-sharing, public campaigns, litigation support, enforcement tracking), with further filters for crime type, working language, legal capacity and the data tools each uses.
A referral component would identify which organisations hold active working relationships with prosecutors in each country and what kinds of cases they can receive, provide a secure, encrypted channel for transmitting a structured evidence package from the organisation that generated it to one positioned to act on it. This handover would happen without creating a traceable link between the originating monitor and the receiving prosecutor. This component would also set common handoff standards (documentation requirements, chain-of-custody rules, evidentiary templates) so that a referral arrives prosecution-ready.
A third, legal-support component would give organisations without in-house counsel access to shared (and pro-bono) legal expertise, from a standing consortium to an on-call roster of specialists.

Several civil society networks already exchange sensitive, real-time intelligence about the same cross-border criminal operations.This sharing happens informally today, but without a common security standard or any agreed rules for what may be shared, with whom, and under what conditions.

The proposal would develop, through a participatory process anchored in the existing informal networks, a lightweight protocol: shared digital-security guidelines, a common way of classifying information and defined triggers for when intelligence should be shared, and explicit conflict-and-exit rules for situations where sharing could endanger field monitors or compromise an ongoing case. It is the upstream complement to the Network Hub: raw intelligence shared through the protocol is what eventually matures into the structured, prosecution-ready evidence that the Hub then routes to prosecutors.

The protocol’s chain-of-custody rules, documentation requirements and evidentiary-format templates should be designed from the outset to converge on the shared evidentiary standard that the CESPIT could broker politically and the CCPI operationalise. The two instruments address different audiences and operate at different points in the chain: the protocol governs what civil society organisations share with one another — sensitive, often early-stage intelligence that must protect the monitors who gather it — while the evidentiary standard governs what governments will treat as reliable and admissible.

4. Amazon Nature Crime Civil Society Forum #

Coordination ultimately depends on trust, and trust depends on repeated interaction over time. No directory, referral channel or protocol can substitute for the working relationships that form when practitioners from different organisations and countries spend time together on shared problems. The Forum would be a recurring (biennial), operationally focused convening of 50–80 civil society organisations (with invited prosecutors and enforcement agencies where appropriate).

It would not be an awareness-raising conference but a working meeting: its purpose would be to populate the coordination infrastructure with human relationships, accelerate the spread of practices that already work, and give the network a regular shared moment to verify and update the Hub’s entries.

Notes #

Carta Capital. AGU cobra R$ 31 milhões em indenizações de infratores por danos ambientais. 2025. Disponível em: https://www.cartacapital.com.br/justica/agu-cobra-r-31-milhoes-em-indenizacoes-de-infratores-por-danos-ambientais/