A new law- widely referred to as the “devastation bill” – has been approved by Brazil’s Congress, withdrawing the protection of 18 million hectares of land. Brazil’s environmental minister Marina Silva has called this bill a “fatal blow”, constituting the most significant setback in environmental protection in the past four decades. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is to approve or veto the bill by Friday, August 8.
The law eliminates requirements for obtaining valid environmental licensing.
One amendment establishes a LAE (special environmental licensing) for businesses considered economically strategic, even if these cause serious environmental degradation. This would also reduce the licensing process to a single stage, removing the current three-licence process, consisting of preliminary, installation and operation procedures.
This measure has been considered unconstitutional by the Ministry of the Environment.
According to the bill, different licensing requirements between states and municipalities are to be instituted. This could result in competition among states over investments, incentivizing businesses to move to regions with less environmental requirements, Marina Silva explained in an interview with Valor Econômico .
Projects that fall under medium polluting potential would also be able to obtain environmental licensing through self-declared online forms, which do not require vital impact studies.
Suely Araújo, political scientist and public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory civil society group, told The Guardian that this law will affect about 90% of environmental licensing in Brazil, especially agricultural projects, a large contributor to environmental degradation.
The UN environmental special rapporteur Astrid Puentes Riaño also said that this law represents “decades of regression” for environmental protections in Brazil. Riaño pointed out that this “will cause deforestation”, as any change or continuation in projects without proper analysis could lead to environmental degradation.
The bill also includes a provision that diminishes the power of political organs responsible for protecting Indigenous rights, in that they will only be involved in licensing decisions for projects happening in official Indigenous territories. According to a report published by ISA, Brazil’s Socio-Environmental Institute, this measure excludes over 30% of Indigenous lands and over 80% of quilombola areas (communities of descendants from black slaves who resisted Brazil’s slavery regime), both still in the process of attaining official recognition.
Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry (MPF) has already issued a document recommending that the president veto 30 of the bill’s provisions, including the one concerning LEA and an amendment restricting the involvement of organizations protecting Indigenous land.
As per the document, this bill “promotes the dismantling of one of the most important instruments of national environmental and human rights protection”.
Lula’s government is still working on a strategy to veto sections of the proposed law, while avoiding confrontations with Congress. Government workers, including ministers, supposedly aim to reach a compromise with lawmakers.
The government is expected to veto three main sections: the establishment of local licensing requirements; the elimination of impact studies for medium polluters; and the one-phase licensing procedure.
The vetoing of the LAE amendment, the most controversial in the bill, is still being discussed, according to Brazilian newspaper Globo.
Featured image credit:
Image: Deforestation in the Amazon
Photographer: Setinel Hub
Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sentinelhub/46200453954
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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