Brazil’s Attorney General Files Climate Lawsuit to Protect Conservation Unit

On September 16, 2024, Brazil’s Attorney General filed a lawsuit seeking compensation for climate damage resulting from environmental infractions allegedly perpetrated by livestock farmers inside a Conservation Unit, more specifically the Jamanxim National Park, located in the Amazon Rainforest.

In Brazil, a Conservation Unit is a type of specially protected area, legally established by public authorities, to which a special protection and management regime applies. In this specific case, following investigations spearheaded by Brazil’s Federal Police, the farmers are being accused of deforestation, irregular cattle breeding, and introducing exotic species to the Conservation Unit.

The Attorney General seeks compensation equivalent to BRL 635 million, which has been calculated based on the social cost of carbon, as per the calculation methodology developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In this novel case, the deforestation attributed to the defendants amounted to a GHG emission of approximately 1,139,000 tons of CO2.

In addition to the compensation for climate damage, the Attorney General also requests that the defendants are compelled to vacate the Conservation Unit and demolish all structures that were illegally built. The lawsuit also seeks to suspend the defendants’ access to financing by official credit agencies, in order to prevent the use of public funds for environmentally harmful activities.

This approach of estimating climate damages by establishing a direct cause and effect between deforestation and the emission of GHG, and applying the social cost of carbon methodology to calculate the compensation, is becoming a trend in Brazil´s climate litigation. As discussed here and here, this same legal tactic has been used by the Attorney General before, as a means of seeking compensation beyond environmental damages per se, i.e., the recovery of areas degraded by deforestation.

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