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In the early morning, the light in the Atacama Desert is still a muted gray. In places the ground is damp, moistened by fog that flows in gentle waves over rocks and scree slopes at daybreak. In northern Chile this weather phenomenon is known as the camanchaca , bringing life where it sometimes doesn’t rain for decades.
Thanks to this climate, some of the world’s rarest cacti grow along the steep coastal hills around the town of Paposo: the Copiapoa. These plants draw nearly all their water from the maritime fog, which sustains surprising biodiversity in an otherwise hostile region.
The Desert Walkers
Few people know this desert as well as Mauricio González. With his volunteer group, the Caminantes del Desierto (Desert Walkers), he regularly patrols the Atacama with a notebook, camera, and water, mapping cactus populations and documenting changes.
In recent years the walkers have seen disturbing patterns.
“We have witnessed the death of entire cactus populations — hundreds of plants simply disappearing,” González says. When fog moisture is no longer sufficient, the plants overheat. Volunteers try to water them, “but often we arrive too late. Then we find only remnants — literally charred by the sun.”
Many Copiapoa are over a century old and adapted to the desert’s extremes. But climate change — hotter temperatures, drier winds, less fog — is pushing them beyond their limits.
A second pressure compounds the crisis.
“We have also observed massive extraction of rare species for the illegal trade,” González says. Local poachers dig up plants for a flourishing global black market. “A loss that cannot be repaired without the help of experts and the public.”
Copiapoa are among the most endangered cactus genera in the world. Researchers still debate their taxonomy, but the International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed 39 taxa and listed 29 as threatened . Six are considered critically endangered. International trade is restricted or prohibited under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the global treaty that regulates cross-border trade in wild species to prevent overexploitation — a system that also governs how Copiapoa can, or cannot, be traded.
For botanist Pablo Guerrero of the Universidad de Concepción, the sharp rise in illegal extraction is especially troubling. He links it directly to international buyers.
“The demand comes from enthusiasts who want to own a piece of the desert — ideally with all the marks of the wild,” he says. For many collectors, Copiapoa have become status symbols, especially when the plants come directly from their natural habitat.
Smartphones and social media have made this trade easier.
“A lot happens via Facebook and Instagram,” Guerrero says. “Buyers can choose the plants themselves. Some sellers even stream live videos from the desert and ask which plants they should dig up.”
The latest IUCN assessment for the species “is significantly worse than the one we conducted 10 years ago,” he adds. He emphasizes that these pressures do not act independently: “Climate change does not act in isolation. It interacts with threats like habitat loss or declining habitat quality.”
Copiapoa grow extremely slowly; some species grow only millimeters per year and take decades to flower. Although they have adapted to life in tough desert conditions, plant ecologist Michiel Pillet of the University of Lausanne, who studies the genus’ climate sensitivity, warns against assuming that cacti are universally hardy.
“Cacti … are adapted to the conditions in their distribution range,” he says. “If those conditions change, as they already are under human-induced climate change, species must adapt, shift their range — or go extinct.”
Pillet’s modeling suggests Copiapoa could lose up to 60% of their habitat as fog patterns and temperatures change.
Illegal trade adds further pressure. A recent study found that 31% of all cactus species worldwide are threatened by poaching — one of the highest rates among plant groups.
The ecological impact becomes visible in the Atacama. Copiapoa are not solitary organisms but structural species that collectively create shade, store moisture, and provide habitat. “They create microclimatic refuges where vertebrates can live and protect themselves not only from the harsh environment but also from predators,” Guerrero explains. Their pollen supports insects and other invertebrates. Removing even a few plants disrupts these networks; the loss of many can be devastating.
A Landmark Ruling
More than 7,500 miles away, in the Italian port city of Ancona, another dimension of the Copiapoa crisis unfolded. Through spring 2025, a courtroom examined the largest documented theft of Copiapoa plants — a case whose extensive investigation became known as “Operation Atacama.”
The case began in February 2020, when Italy’s Carabinieri Forestali — the country’s environmental and forestry police — followed information provided by botanist Andrea Cattabriga in the town of Senigallia. Cattabriga regularly assists European Union authorities in identifying illegally traded ornamental plants.
Inside dealer Andrea Piombetti’s apartment, officers found more than 1,000 Copiapoa. Some species were entirely prohibited from commercial trade; others lacked required documents. The estimated market value exceeded €1 million (about $1.16 million U.S.).
“My first reaction when I saw the Copiapoa was shock — because there had already been a similar incident with this trader years earlier, when he could not be convicted,” Cattabriga recalls.
Forensic evidence and soil samples linked the plants to repeated trips Piombetti made to Chile between 2016 and 2019. Messages and auction records on his devices revealed an international network of at least 10 dealers and 10 regular buyers, with plants sold to collectors in Japan, South Korea, and North America. Piombetti’s closest accomplice, Mattia Crescentini, advertised plants through a since-deleted Instagram account called “Cactus_Italy.”
Piombetti and Crescentini were convicted in criminal court in January 2025, receiving fines and suspended sentences. But the case gained additional significance when Cattabriga’s NGO — the Associazione per la Biodiversità e la sua Conservazione — filed a civil claim arguing that the illegal extraction caused a moral injury to nature and, therefore, damaged ABC’s mission of protecting nature.
In the spring of 2025, the court recognized this second claim — a first in a civil biodiversity case in Italy.
The defendants appealed. Their procedural challenge before Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation was rejected, and the case was sent back to the Court of Appeal for further review. A new hearing is currently scheduled for spring 2026.
If the original decision is upheld, Piombetti and Crescentini would need to pay €20,000 in damages to ABC — money that, according to Cattabriga, would support cactus research, public outreach, and protection.
“What makes this case absolutely unique is that, for the first time in history, a court ordered those responsible to pay damages to an organization — our association — for harming its mission to protect nature,” Cattabriga says. The ruling symbolically acknowledged “a nature that is finally recognized here in all its components: plants, animals, but also rivers, forests, entire ecosystems … with a right to exist.”
This is exactly the kind of precedent environmental scientist Jacob Phelps hopes to strengthen. A longtime advisor to ABC, he is also cofounder of Conservation Litigation, an initiative promoting legal tools for conservation .
“It is very unusual for the state to use its authority to seek remedies for environmental damage,” Phelps says. The Ancona ruling marked the first time in Italy that a conservation organization received damages for biodiversity loss. According to Phelps, such recognition can have symbolic power and may influence courts in other countries. “Access to justice is realistic in many countries — if you know how to do it and if the costs remain manageable,” he says.
Conservation Litigation is supporting similar cases in countries such as the Philippines, Liberia, and Indonesia, focused on habitat destruction and wildlife trade. The aim is to establish that ecological damage can be treated as a civil harm within national legal systems.
For now the Ancona case remains an exception — and its influence will depend partly on how restitution is conceived in practice.
Sending Them Back to the Desert
In April 2021 around 840 confiscated Copiapoa were transferred from Milan’s botanical garden back to Chile. More than 100 of the plants had already died; others remained in Milan for research.
The repatriation was organized by the IUCN Cactus and Succulent Plants Specialist Group under Bárbara Goettsch.
“There was no protocol for returning confiscated plants,” Goettsch says. “We had to develop the procedure step by step ourselves.”
It was the first large-scale return of living cacti to their country of origin, although true reintroduction proved impossible. Many plants had unclear origins, were genetically mixed, or carried potential disease risks. Most will remain under cultivation.
Still, Goettsch calls the case “unprecedented” — less for ecological impact than for awareness raising and international cooperation.
“Many people do not realize that their plant may have been illegally collected. They buy based on appearance — not on origin,” she says.
This desire drives illegal extraction.
“Demand comes from enthusiasts who want to own a piece of the desert — preferably with all the traces of wilderness intact,” Guerrero says. Social media makes it easier: “Some sellers even stream live videos from the desert and ask which plants they should dig up,” he explains. Many Copiapoa are listed only under CITES Appendix II, which regulates but does not prohibit trade. “Some species should be moved to Appendix I,” Goettsch says. “But without capacity building, that won’t help much.” Enforcement authorities worldwide struggle to distinguish legal from illegal plants.
European nurseries grow cacti from global seed stocks, but cultivated plants lack the appearance of old, wild specimens, which often bear scars from decades of exposure — including weathering, sun damage, and lichen growth — that give them a distinct, aged form shaped by harsh desert conditions.
“Trade in European-produced cacti is legal — but it does not help conservation in the countries of origin,” Goettsch says. “Not a single cent from what is sold in Europe goes back to Chile.”
Botanical gardens could support conservation, but many are underfunded and at capacity.
More serious, Pillet warns, is a growing divide between researchers, conservation practitioners, and hobby growers. “Illegal trade has driven a wedge between research, practice, and hobby cultivation.”
Despite steep losses, González and the Caminantes continue searching remote hillsides for surviving plants. Some undocumented species persist in hidden spots known only to the volunteers, who carry water to them in summer.
One site near Mejillones haunts González. Thousands of Copiapoa solaris once grew there, some nearly a meter tall. Today almost all are dead — except for two standing on a windswept ridge.
“We devote our full attention to these two. We preserve them at any cost,” he says.
Their survival is a quiet act of defiance — against the disappearance of life from the desert.
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