Opinion – Rodrigo Tavares: The next president should value the Ministry of the Environment, preparing for its extinction

The ministries of the environment are recent inventions of government activity. The one from Brazil dates from 1992. The one from Portugal was born in 1990, while the one from France is from 1971.

Underlying the foundation was a limited and protectionist view of the environment. The objective of these government departments was the “preservation, conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems, biodiversity and forests”, that is, the ministries served to formulate defensive public policies that would help protect a public heritage of collective use.

Eventually, these ministries could also deal with defining strategies to improve “environmental quality and sustainable use of natural resources”, but the mission remained limited. The environment was only associable with natural ecosystems or with national or local ecological units.

These concepts have become obsolete with time. The environment is now integrated into the broader concept of sustainability, which also encompasses social and economic issues. It is a systemic, planetary, omnipotent formulation. Environmental preservation, social justice and the enhancement of economic activities are inextricably linked, interdependent.

Therefore, in the last decade, these ministries have been undergoing an organic reengineering, as the glossary of the environment has grown in size.

In France, it was renamed “Ministry of Ecological Transition”, to reinforce the idea of ​​systemic change. In Portugal, it was renamed “Ministry of Environment and Climate Action” to emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of actions to combat global warming. Twin trend is visible in Canada, UAE, Norway or India. Singapore, on the other hand, called its ministry “Sustainability and the Environment”.

But Brazil was stuck in the 1990s. Years after the UN introduced the concept of sustainable development and Eco-92 in Rio embraced it as a guiding principle for public policies, the Itamar government renamed the Ministry of the Environment as “Do Meio Environment and the Legal Amazon”, further particularizing its field of actions and contradicting the international course that was beginning to emerge.

Although, later, the name has returned to the original, the blinder vision remains. In 2022, the institutional presentation of the Ministry of the Environment on its official website takes us to a world of VCRs and dial-up internet.

In the future, the transformation of the Ministry of the Environment should not only imply a change of name, for example to “Sustainability and Climate Change”, but also a reorganization and expansion of its scope of action.

The recent concept of the “New European Bauhaus”, presented last year by the European Commission, can serve as an inspiration. To bring the European Green Deal to life – a vast array of billion-dollar initiatives for Europe to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 – the European Union is mobilizing civil society, from scientists to artists, to “reinvent a sustainable way of life”. Sustainability is no longer ecological in the most traditional and literal sense and starts to encompass all dimensions of our lives, from urban mobility to culture.

To think that the Ministry of the Environment of Brazil should serve to take care of the Amazon and defend the natural heritage is too little. Its performance should have greater weight, contributing to the design of public policies in the economy (“decarbonization of economic activities”), housing (“inclusive, resilient and efficient”), energy (“renewable”), agriculture (“agriculture regenerative”), finance (“ESG criteria in investment and banking, plus carbon market”) or transport (“low carbon”). And also culture, social justice, health, education or external relations. It should be a ministry with both an external and an internal calling; more horizontal than vertical.

The trend to include the theme of sustainability in all ministries is emerging in Europe and should be amplified in the coming years. A few months ago, Germany redesigned its traditional ministry of economy into “Ministry of Economy and Climate Action”, rescuing the systemic view of the concept of sustainability. In addition, innovatively, all other ministries are now required to do a “climate check” on all policy and legislative proposals to certify that they are aligned with national sustainable development and climate change goals. Sustainability has become the gatekeeper of government activities.

In the coming decades, ministries of the environment will gradually disappear because sustainability will become a central pillar of all policies of all ministries. Just as the ministries of administrative reforms or digital transition were disappearing in Europe. The original vision of the ministries of the environment – ​​of the protection of natural ecosystems – will have to be swallowed up by any other ministry or be centralized in some governmental island.

Although Brazil is an eminent international actor in the area of ​​the environment, it is still politically and institutionally prepared for the German model of integration of sustainability criteria in all its government activities. It would sow internal disputes, lead to paralysis of decisions and sharpen the ideologization of the environmental agenda, already present in the Brazilian corporate and political fabric.

But the difficulties in approaching the future should not prevent us from moving away from the past. If it is still not possible to eliminate the Ministry of the Environment, it is certainly feasible to modernize it.