In the early hours of July 17, the Chamber of Deputies approved Bill 2159/2021, known as #PLdaDevastação and considered by experts to be the biggest environmental setback in Brazil’s democratic history, by 267 votes to 116. The bill must now be assessed by President Lula, who has just under 15 days to veto it or not. The recently created InstitutoXIS, with its mission to catalyze sustainable practices in Brazilian tourist destinations, promoting the integration of economic development, environmental preservation and social inclusion, is vehemently against the approval of the bill as it is foreseen in the text approved by the National Congress. We understand that in a world impacted by the catastrophic effects of Climate Change and the harmful consequences of social inequalities, the Bill will further deepen the damage caused to the planet and society, especially to the most vulnerable populations. #vetajá
Among the main measures related to the project and criticized by experts are:
- The establishment of the Adhesion and Commitment License (LAC), which allows self-licensing, including for medium-impact projects;
- The Special Environmental License (LAE), which gives political treatment to projects considered to be ‘priorities’, granting the license in an accelerated manner and despite potential damage to the environment;
- It also reduces the protection of indigenous peoples and traditional communities by removing the obligation to consult FUNAI and ICMBio when licensing projects that affect indigenous lands, conservation units or territories in the process of demarcation;
- It allows states and municipalities to define, without national coordination, the activities that should or should not be subject to environmental licensing.
Why environmental licensing matters
In an interview with Agência Pública, former federal deputy Fabio Feldman, author of the chapter of the Constitution on environmental protection, explains that the importance of environmental licensing lies in setting rules that must be followed when implementing large, medium and small projects. “Today, licensing exists in practically every country in the world, it is provided for in all the conventions on the environment, biodiversity, climate change, combating desertification,” he says.
According to Feldman, three recent examples in Brazil’s history demonstrate the damage that the lack of proper licensing can cause. One of them is the municipality of Cubatão, in São Paulo, which came to be considered the most polluted in the world due to the implementation of a petrochemical complex in its area, at a time when there was still no environmental licensing as we know it today.
According to Feldmann, the accidents in Mariana in 2015, which left 19 dead, and Brumadinho in 2019, with 272 deaths, could also have been avoided if environmental licensing had been associated with a risk study. Both cities had part of their territory buried by mud after dams burst, dumping millions of cubic meters of mining tailings, burying a total of more than two hundred people.
The problem isn’t the law
The former MP agrees that the structure available in the country needs to be reviewed to make the environmental licensing process more agile. “What this debate is revealing is the precariousness with which the National Environmental System (Sisnama) has been operating in Brazil for the last 25 years. [Obtaining the environmental license] takes time because the agencies don’t have enough professionals,” he said in an interview with Agência Pública.
In other words, even after environmental licensing was created and the number of protected areas in Brazil increased dramatically, there are fewer people allocated to meet this demand. According to Feldmann, the delay in the process can also be the responsibility of the entrepreneur, who starts the licensing process but delays submitting additional information, and then holds the agency responsible.
It is therefore essential to shift the focus of the discussion to improving this structure and not to destroying the environmental protection mechanisms that Brazil currently has in place and which protect all Brazilians. Finally, we believe that it is necessary to combat the fallacious mentality that environmental preservation is a luxury to the detriment of progress. There is no progress without a planet, without people and without possible businesses.
With information from the report PL da Devastação wants to take Brazil “back to the 1960s”, by @agenciapublica
Feldmann https://apublica.org/2025/07/pl-do-licenciamento-quer-levar-brasil-para-1960-diz-feldmann/