By Melina Risso, et al.

Environmental crime became the world’s third most lucrative illicit economy after drug trafficking and smuggling, with estimates of $110 to $281 billion in annual profits. Between 2006 and 2016, environmental crimes grew at a rate of 5% to 7% per year, a pace two or three times faster than that of global GDP growth. Money laundering is part of the criminal machinery that plunders the Amazon Rainforest.

The study “Follow the Money: connecting anti-money laundering systems to disrupt environmental crime in the amazon” reveals the need for systems, agencies, and institutions responsible for preventing money laundering to turn their attention to the connections between this illicit practice and environmental crimes.

The Igarapé study shows that the money laundering cycle follows three stages before the laundered funds can enter the financial system: placement, layering, and integration. However, not all proceeds from criminal activity are directly laundered into the formal financial system. Thus, informal diversification constitutes the process of moving illegal flows into the informal economy. It is estimated that 30% of the money to be laundered is used to pay the operating expenses of illicit economies. Cash transactions, divided into small amounts and deposited by “money mules,” are used to finance the hiring of precarious labor, accommodations, food, security, transportation, health services, leisure, and machinery, for example. The remaining 70% of illicit proceeds are formally inserted into the financial system.

Rio de Janeiro - RJ - Brasil ; Igarape Institute, 2023. 33p.

By The Wildlife Justice Commission

The report presents a collection of case studies to illustrate the mechanisms and modalities of corruption in real terms - how it facilitates the movement of wildlife shipments through all stages of the supply chain from source to market, and how it obstructs the criminal justice response, allowing criminal networks to operate with impunity. This report also highlights the harm caused by corruption and urges strong coordinated action to counter it. Wildlife crime and corruption must be addressed in a more connected way, rather than being treated as two separate issues in law enforcement responses. Levelling the playing field will require an innovative and collective approach on the part of all stakeholders to identify the high-risk areas for corruption, develop the means to prevent, investigate, and prosecute corrupt activities, and establish a robust framework to tackle corruption along the wildlife supply chain.

The Hague: Wildlife Justice Commission, 2023. 44p.

By The Organization of American States, Department against Transnational Organized Crime

The illegal gold trade is a growing and significant challenge in Ecuador. The spread of illegal gold mining activity has brought surges of violence and instability to remote areas while attracting organized crime, at the local and international level, and triggering an increase in money laundering and contraband. Concern regarding the disruptive and harmful impact of illegal gold mining, as well as the government’s desire to develop and expand Ecuador’s mining sector away from its reliance on small-scale and artisanal operations, have also led to a renewed focus on the challenges posed by illegal mining. There is reason to believe that the illegal gold trade and its associated criminal networks are less entrenched and developed in Ecuador than in neighboring Peru and Colombia. However, there are significant challenges facing the government as it works to combat illegal mining activity, which is increasingly accelerated by illicit cross-border contraband flows and unique vulnerabilities to money laundering activity.

Washington, DC: The Organization of American States, Department against Transnational Organized Crime, 2021. 46p.

By Sage Melcer and Simon Zadek.

A new report published today from Finance for Biodiversity (F4B) points to how to break the environmentally-destructive connection between environmental crimes and legitimate investments. F4B calls on the global financial community, working with regulators and civil society organisations, to take steps to ensure the entire financing value chain is free of environmental crimes.

Environment crime, such as illegal wildlife trade and logging, is now one of the most profitable global criminal enterprises, generating up to almost USD300 billion in criminal gains each year, and creating even more profound damage and cost to the environment and society. Many entirely legal enterprises benefit from such environmental crimes, as do those who finance them.

The report highlights the opportunity to reduce environmental crimes by widening the scope and interpretation of existing Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules. Pointing to the limits of such an approach, however, the report highlights the need to go further, and proposes a way forward paralleling anti-slavery and conflict diamond approaches. Finally, it encourages the financial community to take leadership in advancing widely adopted and effective voluntary measures to ensuring environmental crime-free financing value chains, and points to first-mover advantages in avoiding likely reputation damage, litigation, and poorly-designed legislation.

The report is an invited contribution to the UK Government-sponsored Global Resource Initiative (GRI), a multi-sectoral taskforce mandated to provide recommendations on greening the UK’s international supply chain footprint. Its recommendations are, however, internationally applicable.

Finance for Diversity, 2022. 17p,

Edited by Christian Nellemann

This report Green Carbon, Black Trade by UNEP and INTERPOL focuses on illegal logging and its impacts on the lives and livelihoods of often some of the poorest people in the world set aside the environmental damage. It underlines how criminals are combining old fashioned methods such as bribes with high tech methods such as computer hacking of government web sites to obtain transportation and other permits. The report spotlights the increasingly sophisticated tactics being deployed to launder illegal logs through a web of palm oil plantations, road networks and saw mills.

Nairobi, Kenya: Arendal, Norway: United Nations Environment Program, GRID-Arendal.; 2012. 72p.

By The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)

Environmental crime covers a wide range of activities, from illegal extraction and trade of forestry and minerals to illegal land clearance and waste trafficking. Actors involved in these crimes vary from large organized crime groups to multinational companies and individuals. Perpetrators of environmental crime rely on both the financial and non-financial sector to launder their proceeds. The ‘low risk, high reward’ nature of environmental crime makes for a lucrative and safe source of revenue for criminals. This is partly due to a regulatory and legal environment that is not always consistent globally and does not fully address the financial aspects and money laundering (ML) risks of these crimes. The FATF conducted this study to strengthen awareness of the scale and nature of criminal gains and laundering techniques for environmental crimes. This study builds on the FATF’s 2020 report on financial flows from the illegal wildlife trade. It brings together expertise from across the FATF’s Global Network to identify good practices that governments and the private sector can take to disrupt the profitability of environmental crimes. The findings for this report are based on case studies and good practices provided by over 40 countries, alongside expertise from civil society and the private sector.

Paris: FATF, 2021. 70p.

By James Wingard and Maria Pascual

Anti-money laundering (AML) laws have the potential to play a crucial, game-changing role in transforming wildlife trafficking from a low-risk/high-reward to a high-risk environment. Yet despite the 2017 UN Resolution callings on countries to leverage AML laws in the fight against wildlife trafficking, they remain under-utilised. Investigations and prosecutions in the case of wildlife-trafficking crimes still rely primarily on charges for poaching or trafficking, while money-laundering crimes are mostly overlooked. There are several reasons for this, one of them being the degree to which wildlife crimes constitute a predicate offence. This paper reviews the AML laws from 110 jurisdictions from the Legal Atlas online platform to determine their applicability to illegal wildlife trade (IWT) crimes, showing positive results for 64 out of the 110 countries. The paper also flags some more general challenges that may hinder the application of such AML laws.

Missoula, MT: Legal Atlas, 2019. 29p.

By Financial Action Task Force

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is a major transnational organised crime, which generates billions of criminal proceeds each year. IWT fuels corruption, threatens biodiversity, and can have a significant negative impact on public health and the economy. To move, hide and launder their proceeds1 , wildlife traffickers exploit weaknesses in the financial and non-financial sectors, enabling further wildlife crimes and damaging financial integrity. Despite this, jurisdictions2 rarely investigate the financial trail left by this crime. 2. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), as the global standard setter on antimoney laundering (AML), countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) and countering proliferation financing (CPF), is concerned about the lack of focus on the financial aspects of this crime, and has conducted this study to support jurisdictions to combat related money laundering. The FATF Standards (i.e. 40 Recommendations) provide a useful framework for jurisdictions to address these threats by strengthening their national laws, policies, and co-operation at the domestic and international level. 3. This is the FATF’s first global report on IWT. It builds on previous studies by two of the FATF-Style Regional Bodies (FSRBs), work by other international bodies and recent initiatives by the private sector. This study by the FATF makes a unique contribution by assessing the money laundering (ML) aspects of wildlife crimes, and by demonstrating how jurisdictions should apply the FATF standards to combat IWT. The findings in this report are based on inputs from around 50 jurisdictions across the FATF Global Network, as well as expertise from the private sector and civil society. This study highlights that jurisdictions should view the proceeds generated by IWT as a global threat, rather than as a problem only for those jurisdictions where wildlife is illegally harvested, transited, or sold. In particular, criminals are frequently misusing the legitimate wildlife trade, as well as other import-export type businesses, as a front to move and hide illegal proceeds from wildlife crimes. They also rely regularly on corruption, complex fraud and tax evasion. Another key theme of this study is the growing role of online marketplaces and mobile and social media-based payments to facilitate movement of proceeds from wildlife crimes. These trends highlight the increasing importance of a coordinated response from public authorities, the private sector and civil society to identify and disrupt financial flows from IWT.

Paris: Financial Action Task Force (FATF)., 2020. 72p.