Green activists have warned that changes made by Brazil’s president to a bill that would allow the government to push through energy and infrastructure projects are not strong enough to fully protect its environment, forests and local communities.
On the last day for him to take a decision on what environmental campaigners have dubbed the ‘devastation bill’, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vetoed 63 of the text’s nearly 400 provisions, while giving a green light to the rest. Approved by Congress on July 17, the bill proposes streamlining environmental licensing in the country.
In an official statement, the government said Lula’s vetoes would ensure “environmental protection and legal certainty”, including for investors.
Marina Silva, Brazil’s minister of environment and climate change, described the outcome as “the result of a major effort to achieve greater efficiency without sacrificing quality in the licensing process”.
Ana Carolina Crisostomo, a conservation specialist with WWF-Brazil, said the vetoes “were a response to society’s outcry, which mobilised broadly against the text of the bill approved by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.”
“Erosion” of environmental oversight
Environmentalists welcomed Lula’s veto of provisions in the bill that would have restricted consultation on projects with agencies responsible for protecting Indigenous and traditional communities, as well as the removal of the special protection regime for the Atlantic Forest.
However two provisions that weakened the process were approved with alterations: a system to allow some projects to issue their own licences, called Environmental License by Adhesion and Commitment (LAC), and a Special Environmental License (LAE) to fast track “strategic projects.”
“While some blatantly unacceptable provisions got vetoed, others that were just as bad advanced, putting the government’s interests ahead of the environment,” Lucas Kannoa, head of legal affairs at the Arayara International Institute, told Climate Home News. “The main impact is a significant erosion of oversight and control procedures.”
The institute has mapped at least 2,600 fossil fuel projects that could gain accelerated approval under the new LAE.
“For the first time, environmental licensing will be conducted under a purely political logic,” Arayara said in a statement. It called the partial rubber-stamping of the LAE a “victory of the lobbying efforts of national and foreign oil and large mining companies.”
Brazilian indigenous women marching against the “devastation bill” in Brasilia on Thursday August 7, adding pressure for president Lula da Silva to veto the bill. (Photo: Amanda Magnani)What changes with the vetoes
Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory, a Brazilian think-tank, said the presidential vetoes did “rectify some of the worst horrors of the bill” amid a difficult political landscape, with strong pressure from the country’s agribusiness and energy lobbies.
In the original text of the bill approved by Congress, the LAC self-licensing process would have exempted low and medium-impact projects from having to win approval from environmental agencies, provided the companies completed an online declaration of compliance with the rules.