Amazon Destruction Is Becoming a Global Climate Debt -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

For decades, wreaking havoc upon the Brazilian Amazon has been practised as a national environmental crime: illegally take land, cut down trees, paying damaged control fines that were neither commensurate nor even paid where enforcement made it through and revel in ecocide transformed into valuable cattle or soy.

That business model has recently had the first branches of it chipped away, through climate litigation. The new legal argument is unprecedented: the destruction of forests is not just a harm to trees or Brazil. It makes them release trapped carbon +70% of all that new trees can be planted, eliminates the absorption of any future carbon and compound a planetary crisis. The climate-related damage it inflicts should therefore come at a cost to its perpetrators.

The who are illegal land grabbers, ranchers, mining interests, agribusiness corporations and governments that undermine environmental protections. The what is a new generation of complete civil, constitutional and transnational proceedings. It begins in Brazilian courts but then plays out in business supply chains, foreign consumers and international accountability bodies. The study raises two questions: the when is urgent, as scientific warnings are of degradation, drought and fire threatening large areas of the Amazon with an irreversible ecological tipping point.

The why is brutally simple. Privatize profits and export climatic losses to humanity.

In PSB and Others v. Brazil, political parties appealed against the paralysis of the Amazon Fund by the federal government. The fund was reactivated after Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ruled against the federal government for obstructing climate protection, declaring that “protection of climate is a constitutive duty”. In Institute of Amazonian Studies v. Brazil, the plaintiffs in fact went further, asserting that a stable climate system is a constitutional or fundamental right.

In 2024, a Brazilian federal court ordered Dirceu Kruger, the owner of an agglomeration in the state of Mato Grosso e with approximately 292 million reais (then about $50 million), for illegally deforesting around 5,600 hectares of Amazon rainforest. It was not just timber or restoration costs that were taken into account in the calculation. It blamed destruction for just under 901,600 tonnes of carbon (£50 million) and said climate damage was worth about €60 a tonne using estimates from the US Environmental Protection Agency and OECD. His assets were frozen, limitations imposed on his agricultural activities and he was ordered to restore the land. The ruling was appealable, but the reasoning was historic: carbon that is released via deforestation causes compensable harm. The Guardian

But the how must be based on real science. Satellite imagery can determine the Where, When and Scale. Carbon-accounting models can estimate emissions for noncompliance or loss of sequestration. Cattle or soy can be traced to land subject to an embargo through supply-chain records. But attribution science should not be overdone: it is much easier to demonstrate the measurable carbon contribution of our cleared estate to cumulative global warming than that it caused any specific foreign flooding event, let alone prove causative links one way when evidence for another must also be produced.

Corporate accountability also needs to be defined correctly. The case was an OECD Guidelines complaint against the multinational trader Cargill concerning Brazilian soy—not a traditional damages lawsuit per se—about shortcomings in commitments on deforestation and human-rights due diligence. However, international mechanisms can produce demonstration, reputation pressure and documentation for subsequent litigation. ClientEarth

Brazil now needs to implement a judicially reviewable carbon-damages protocol; impose joint liability on financiers, processors and exporters that knowingly benefit from illegal supply chains; preserve satellite evidence through transparent forensic standards; and make compensation available for restoration and affected Indigenous and traditional communities.

The Report recommends that importing states must mandate traceability to the farm level, ban products from areas where rainforest has been illegally cleared; and recognize foreign environmental judgments. Courts should freeze assets before the criminals conceal their ill-gotten gains.

The Amazon cannot be how humanity shields itself from climate challenges, while also serving as a sacrifice zone for private property. Accountability for destruction that has global consequences must follow the carbon, not stop at Brazilian borders.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia