- Lawmakers approved a bill that weakens Brazil’s environmental licensing framework, which creates self-approving licensing and hands decisions to local politicians.
- The new law eases critical impact studies for large-scale enterprises such as mining dams and threatens hundreds of Indigenous and Quilombola communities.
- The bill’s approval occurred amid an ongoing political crisis between President Lula and the right-wing-led Congress.
In the early hours of July 17, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies approved a bill to ease environmental licensing, which NGOs and environmentalists have dubbed the “devastation bill” and consider the nation’s most significant environmental setback in nearly 40 years. The final score was 267 in favor and 116 against it.
The law changes several rules of the environmental licensing framework, which is mandatory for all enterprises that use natural resources and may cause damage to the environment or local communities. Marina Silva, Brazil’s minister of environment and climate change, wrote on Instagram that the bill “fatally wounds one of the country’s main instruments of environmental protection.”
One of the bill’s most controversial points is the License by Adhesion and Commitment, under which projects would be approved by simply filling out an online form. WWF estimates around 80% of all ventures could benefit from the new rule, including major infrastructure projects such as mining dams. “That’s why we say it’s the end of environmental licensing,” Ana Carolina Crisostomo, WWF-Brasil’s conservation expert, told Mongabay.
The law also creates a special environmental license for infrastructure projects deemed “strategic” by the federal administration, such as oil exploration on the Amazon coast and renewal of the BR-319 highway, a road connecting the capitals of Rondônia and Amazonas states that would affect 40 conservation areas and 50 Indigenous territories.
“It is a project tailored to serve predatory sectors and dismantles decades of progress in Brazilian environmental legislation,” representative Nilto Tatto, the environmental caucus coordinator in the Chamber of Deputies, told Mongabay in a WhatsApp message.
The new legislation also exempts entrepreneurs from considering their projects’ impact on hundreds of Indigenous and Quilombola communities — inhabited by descendants of enslaved Black people — that haven’t been fully titled by the federal administration. According to Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian NGO that advocates for traditional people, 32.6% of all Indigenous territories and 80% of Quilombola communities would be excluded from the impact studies.
The bill was approved less than four months before Brazil hosts the COP30 climate summit in the Amazonian city of Belém. According to the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, it casts “doubt on Brazil’s leadership role in global efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.” In a letter to the foreign affairs minister, Mauro Vieira, the civil society coalition Climate Observatory stated the bill threatens many of Brazil’s international commitments and could jeopardize the conclusion of the trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union.
The days leading up to the approval fueled an intense campaign against the bill on social media, with the participation of famous Brazilian artists like the international superstar and pop singer Anitta. On July 13, protesters displayed a 100-meter-long banner criticizing the proposal in São Paulo’s most famous venue, Avenida Paulista. Business entities and representatives of environmentalists, scientists, lawyers, health professionals, social movements and traditional communities also spoke out against the proposal.
Supporters of the bill said it will bring legal security and reduce bureaucracy for Brazilian entrepreneurs. The bill’s rapporteur, federal deputy Zé Vitor, denied that the law promotes the loosening of legislation. “There is a simplification of the process, a streamlining of procedures,” he told the Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico. The president of the agribusiness caucus, federal deputy Pedro Lupion, celebrated the approval on social media. “Finally, we have perfected legislation to unlock investments, reduce bureaucracy in the system and generate opportunities and income for the country,” he wrote.
NGOs and environmental experts, however, argue the new rules will increase legal uncertainty by delegating to each state or municipality the authority to determine a project’s impacts and the type of licensing it must follow. In a public statement, the program manager of Transparency International Brazil, Renato Morgado, stated the new legislation “reduces transparency and technical control, paves the way for political interference, favors private interests and increases the risk of corruption.”
The approval happened amid a political crisis between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and an increasingly powerful Congress. In late May, the Brazilian environmental news website Sumaúma reported that the omission of Lula’s administration had contributed to the bill’s approval.
The Senate already approved the bill. Now, President Lula has 15 days to veto or enact it. “We will continue to press President Lula to veto the most dangerous parts of this bill,” Tatto told Mongabay. However, Congress would likely overturn a veto, and the law is bound to be challenged in the Supreme Court.
Banner image: Protesters in the Climate March in São Paulo, rallying against the Destruction Bill. The demonstration drew thousands of people to the streets in response to the bill’s threat to weaken Brazil’s environmental licensing laws. Image © Tuane Fernandes / Greenpeace.
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