"Top brands buy Amazon carbon credits from suspected timber laundering scam", May 2024

...Two major carbon projects in the Brazilian Amazon, whose credits have been sold to companies like Gol Airlines, Nestlé, Toshiba and PwC, may have been used to launder timber from illegally deforested areas. 

The conclusion comes from an analysis by the Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA), a Netherlands-based nonprofit founded by prosecutors and investigators that investigates emitters of climate-warming greenhouse gasses. Brazilian authorities had already launched timber laundering probes in the areas covered by CCCA’s analysis, which resulted in the suspension of logging authorizations. The owner of a company responsible for one of these projects has a prior conviction for timber laundering...

CCCA analyzed two REDD+ projects, called Unitor and Fortaleza Ituxi,  in the municipality of Lábrea, in Amazonas state. The two projects cover a combined area of 140,862 hectares (348,078 acres) — twice the size of London — and aim to avoid 660,598 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year by preventing the spread of deforestation in one of the Amazon’s most under-pressure areas.

REDD+ stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. The idea behind it is that landowners receive money for protecting an area that could otherwise be deforested...

In these two cases, however, CCCA found inconsistencies between the volume of timber declared to authorities and the logged volume estimated through satellite images — a mismatch that indicates these areas may have been used to launder the equivalent of more than 4,200 truckloads of wood. 

Grupo Ituxi, the company behind both projects, denied in a statement to Mongabay any connection with timber laundering and said all of its initiatives are audited, verified and recorded...

While in some areas the projects extracted much less timber than they declared, in others they did the opposite...

Both Unitor and Fortaleza Ituxi are led by Ricardo Stoppe Jr., a doctor from São Paulo, and certified by Verra, one of the world’s largest voluntary carbon market registries and the most important for REDD+ initiatives. 

Stoppe’s company, Grupo Ituxi, said it only owns the forest management plans and that logging is carried out by third parties...Grupo Ituxi also contested the findings of CCCA’s analysis, saying satellite imagery isn’t enough to assess actual logging volumes, which it added could only be achieved by an on-site inspection. 

A Verra spokesperson said the company needs more details about the analyses before commenting on the findings...

In a statement to Mongaby, Carbonext said it wasn’t involved with the forest management carried out in the area, and that “there are no scientifically recognized ways of determining the volume of wood in forest management projects based solely on satellite images”...