The Amazon Rainforest is the largest tropical forest on the planet, covering an area of approximately 6.3 million square kilometers and extending across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, and the Guianas. Half of the planet’s biodiversity is contained within it. Its vegetation is indispensable for maintaining the global rainfall regime. Twenty percent of the world’s fresh water is found there. Approximately 60.3% of this natural wealth lies within Brazilian territory, which demands from the country a distinct and heightened duty of care to ensure its protection.
In Brazil, unlike in other countries, most greenhouse gas emissions originate from deforestation and land-use change. Since 2023, the renewal of environmental and climate protection policies after a four-year period of anti-environmental policy has marked a turning point in Brazil’s environmental governance. Alongside stronger enforcement by federal agencies such as IBAMA (the federal environmental agency) and ICMBio (the federal agency for protected areas), and the creation of new protected areas, this shift has led to a significant and consistent decline in Amazon deforestation. 2025 marked the third consecutive year of reduction in deforestation, with official data indicating a decrease of approximately 11% in the period from August 2024 to July 2025. These advances, however, are not limited to State action alone. Climate litigation —against both governments and corporations — has played a distinct role in giving effect to the protection of this biome. This blog post delves into a batch of cases recently added to the Sabin Center’s database, delving into their background and rationale.
The “Amazon Protege” Project
As evidenced by the recent inclusion of 193 cases challenging illegal amazon deforestation in the Sabin Center’s Climate Litigation Database (see Brazilian geography here), climate litigation in Brazil has grown exponentially, driven mainly by the Federal Public Prosecution’s Office (Ministério Público Federal – MPF) through its project “Amazon Protects” (“Amazônia Protege”). Launched in 2017 to combat illegal deforestation, the project uses satellite technology and procedural innovations to identify large illegally deforested areas, which serve as a basis for lawsuits against landowners. The MPF has filed several lawsuits seeking to hold offenders, i.e., landowners of deforested areas, accountable and ensure full reparation of environmental and climate damages. The project’s core motivation is to reinforce large-scale environmental civil liability, serving as an institutional response to the growth of deforestation and the need to protect the Amazon rainforest for present and future generations.
Since its launch, the “Amazon Protects” project has been executed in phases, each covering a period of illegal deforestation mapped by the Amazon Deforestation Monitoring Project (“PRODES” system, from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research). In each phase, hundreds of public lawsuits were filed simultaneously, targeting the owners of land that satellite images show has been deforested. Together, the first three stages resulted in more than 3,700 lawsuits against illegal deforestation in the Amazon forest. 1,125 lawsuits were filed in the 1st phase (2017), regarding deforestation that occurred between August 2015 and July 2016. An additional 1,414 lawsuits were filed in the 2nd phase (2018), involving deforestation during the August-July 2017 period. 1,023 more lawsuits were filed in the 3rd phase (2020), concerning deforestation in the August 2017-December 2019 period.
By 2024, these cases had generated more than 700 final judgments imposing liability on deforesters. Important legal precedents have also been established: for example, the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) officially recognized satellite imagery as valid evidence for environmental crime sanctions, a recognition later incorporated into National Council of Justice (CNJ) Recommendation 99/2021.
A recent study of the Amazon Protects Project, Are Courts punishing illegal deforesters in the Brazilian Amazon?, by Imazon, found that 78% of the lawsuits were dismissed without prejudice (506 cases) and 2% were dismissed on the merit. 12% of the lawsuits (80 cases) were removed to state courts due to lack of federal jurisdiction. Only 8% (51 lawsuits) resulted in rulings with prejudice, including one case with an Agreement Term between the prosecutors and defendant. The 51 lawsuits that resulted in convictions involved 5,734 hectares deforested. This was particularly important for formulating recommendations aimed at increasing environmental liability for illegal deforestation before the courts.
This history demonstrates the Amazon Protects project’s partial success in holding environmental offenders accountable on a large scale, recovering thousands of hectares of forest, and establishing favorable jurisprudence for the use of geospatial intelligence in environmental protection. The next phases of the project will provide an opportunity for improvement and for ensuring greater effectiveness.
4th Phase of “The Amazon Protects” project in 2024 – including climate
At the end of 2024, the MPF launched the 4th phase of the “Amazon Protects” project, which consisted of filing 193 public lawsuits against individuals responsible for illegal deforestation occurring between January 2020 and December 2022. These lawsuits were filed in a coordinated effort by the MPF’s 4th Coordination and Review Chamber (Environment and Cultural Heritage) together with federal prosecutors’ offices in the Brazilian states of the Amazon Rainforest.
The cases cover deforestation detected by satellite imagery during the defined period and focused on large polygons: areas of approximately 272 thousand acres or more of illegally cleared forest. This is an even stricter threshold than the one used in previous phases (which considered areas larger than 148 thousand acres), demonstrating a prioritization of the largest deforestation events at this stage.
Geographically, the 193 actions of the 4th phase were distributed across four states of the Legal Amazon: Amazonas, Pará, Mato Grosso, and Rondônia. Pará was the most affected during the period, with approximately 173 thousand acres of illegally deforested land, resulting in 89 actions against 369 defendants. Amazonas follows, with about 36 thousand hectares cleared and 40 actions filed against 161 defendants. Mato Grosso and Roraima together accounted for around 50 thousand hectares of native vegetation destroyed, leading to 64 actions against 239 defendants. Many deforestation hotspots were located near protected areas: the MPF’s survey indicated that 140 of the deforested polygons were located within 18.5 miles of federal conservation units or Indigenous lands, and 8 were found inside protected areas, highlighting the risk that illegal deforestation poses to particularly sensitive protected territories.
According to the Panorama of Climate Litigation in Brazil 2025 report, with the inclusion of the “Amazon Protects” cases, private actors – especially individuals – became the main defendants in climate litigation in Brazil in 2025, surpassing for the first time the number of actions against public actors in the mapped climate litigation dataset. While this represents progress in holding previously hard-to-reach agents accountable (namely, individual deforesters), it also reveals structural gaps. Many of these individuals may be intermediaries or ‘fronts’ inserted into the deforestation chain, acting as proxies for the real owners to hide their involvement and avoid legal responsibility. This suggests that many defendants are used to enable land appropriation and illegal exploitation, while the financiers or masterminds of these operations are not always nominally present in the lawsuits. This could lead to cases being dismissed on procedural grounds, creating a barrier to achieving climate justice.
In this 4th stage, the MPF also quantified the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the deforestation caused by the defendants, estimating that the illegal clearings covered released about 57.9 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This volume corresponds to almost 10% of all Amazon carbon dioxide emissions in 2023, an impressive number that reinforces the link between deforestation and climate change.
Each public civil action in the 4th phase of Amazon Protects seeks full reparation for the socio-environmental damages caused by deforestation, following the principles of Brazilian environmental law. This is reflected in the remedies sought in all 193 actions, which include: (a) environmental restoration (in natura), requiring reforestation or regeneration of the area to its original state; (b) material damage compensation, calculated based on restoration costs per hectare to fund recovery projects; (c) compensation for carbon dioxide emissions, financially offsetting the carbon dioxide released, based on technical parameters, based on the values established by the Amazon Fund; (d) punitive damages for collective intangible harm, intended to symbolically repair the intangible harm caused to society and the common environmental heritage. Item (c) represents the main innovation in the remedies sought, distinguishing this phase from the earlier ones.
The intensive use of territorial intelligence and technology as evidentiary support represents an extremely relevant aspect of the 4th phase. All lawsuits were supported by technical reports based on satellite imagery, geospatial analysis, and cross-referencing public records (rural registries, land registries, infraction reports, etc.) to delineate the deforested areas and identify those responsible. Unlike the earlier phases, this stage relied on a broader range of public databases and more recent, higher-resolution satellite imagery, allowing for more precise identification of deforested areas and responsible parties at the time the lawsuits were filed.
A recent development that may contribute to the success of these actions is the adoption of two environmental adjudication protocols issued in 2023 and 2024 by the National Council of Justice. Created to guide Brazilian judges in incorporating the environmental and climate dimensions into their judicial decisions, the first protocol validates the use of remote sensing evidence or satellite imagery, while the second establishes criteria for quantifying environmental and climate damage in cases of deforestation and wildfires. As a result, Brazil stands out as a country that directs its courts to recognize that remote sensing (satellite) evidence may be used as a legitimate and sufficient means to prove deforestation, environmental degradation, and vegetation suppression, and that, in cases involving damage to flora resulting from deforestation, courts must quantify the environmental harm caused, including its climate impacts.
In the project’s 4th phase, this strategy reached a new level by incorporating a climate dimension into the lawsuits. Although each lawsuit addresses a specific case of deforestation, the set of 193 cases has been recognized as an important batch of “climate litigation” in the country, given that all present similar arguments connecting deforestation to climate change (especially through the calculation of greenhouse gas emissions). While the petitions do not delve deeply into specific climate legislation (such as the National Policy on Climate Change), focusing instead on classical environmental laws, by quantifying climate damage and seeking compensation for carbon dioxide emissions, these actions inaugurate an unprecedented practice of climate accountability at the national level. This represents an important institutional advancement: the MPF, traditionally the guardian of the environment, also becomes the leading litigant in climate matters in Brazil, expanding the boundaries of environmental protection to include climate protection.
Conclusion
The lawsuits of the 4th phase of the “Amazon Protects” project, still pending before the trial courts of the Brazilian Federal Judiciary, represent a historic milestone in accountability for environmental and climate damages in Brazil. Never before have so many climate-related actions been filed in a coordinated and standardized manner, directly connecting illegal deforestation to global warming in a judicial effort. By filing 193 simultaneous actions demanding compensation for material, collective moral and climate-related damages, the MPF raised environmental litigation to a new level, integrating considerations of carbon dioxide emissions and the social value of forest carbon into compensation calculations. This achievement places Brazil at the forefront of global climate litigation numerically (the country already ranks among the world leaders in the number of climate lawsuits) and represents an innovation in the creative use of classical legal foundations to address contemporary challenges such as the climate crisis.
The 4th phase of the “Amazon Protects” project could symbolize a maturation of anti-deforestation policies, combining strategic litigation, scientific evidence (remote sensing), and a long-term climate perspective. The use of this new form of litigation, however, must be accompanied by an assessment of its effectiveness, along with the improvement of its instruments. It could represent a concrete step toward climate accountability, internalizing in Brazilian courts the idea that destroying the Amazon not only violates environmental laws but also harms the global climate balance – and that both damages must be repaired.
When combined with international initiatives such as the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF), the experience with the Amazon Protects project shows how judicial and financial instruments can work in synergy to reward standing forests and punish forest destruction. The remaining challenge is to extend accountability to all links in the deforestation chain, but the path has been laid. The message is clear that destroying the Amazon is costly, and keeping the forest protected may finally prove worthwhile.
Janaína Aparecida Julião
PhD Candidate in Constitutional Law at the Brazilian Institute for Education, Development and Research (IDP). Researcher at CASP – Climate, Argumentation, and Separation of Powers research initiative.
Mariana Barbosa Cirne
Graduate Program Professor at the Brazilian Institute for Education, Development and Research (IDP). Leader of CASP – Climate, Argumentation, and Separation of Powers research initiative.
