Dubbed the “mother of all cattle” by the environmentalist bench in Congress, the general environmental licensing bill is based on one of the proposals by the CNI (National Confederation of Industry) for candidates for the Presidency of the Republic.
The text in progress in the Senate exempts most of the undertakings of license, evaluation and inspection.
The agenda has become one of the priorities of the industry, which will take 21 proposals to the presidential candidates at an event this Wednesday (29) in BrasÃlia.
“The emphasis we are giving to licensing goes hand in hand with the maturity of the theme, on which we have been working for 17 years within the National Congress. So, it was widely discussed and it is already starting to match the urgency, the importance, the cost Brazil , with environmental issues and other variables for you to put on the agenda for the day”, he told Sheet Davi Bomtempo, executive sustainability manager at CNI.
The environmental agenda —which in 2010 appeared only on the final pages of the document delivered by the sector to the presidential candidates—is currently the subject of 2 of the 21 CNI proposals, bringing the recommendations for regulating the carbon market and reviewing environmental licensing.
The level of proposed amendment to environmental standards has also increased. In the 2010 elections, the sector pointed to the need for greater agility and efficiency to shorten the time for issuing licenses, asked for clarity between the functions of federal and state agencies and also for the recognition of companies with differentials in environmental policies.
In the 2014 elections, the CNI proposal stated that “it is important that the Union minimally harmonize some rules and procedures to avoid harmful environmental competition between states and municipalities”.
In 2018, the CNI began to ask that obtaining the license not be conditional on obtaining opinions from bodies other than the licensor. The sector was also urgently asking for the approval of the general licensing law.
This year, the industry brings a 50-page proposal on environmental licensing, including a table that compares the CNI’s recommendations to the bill’s solutions, revealing how the proposals imply the simplification of processes.
The proposal “to strengthen the teams of the licensing agencies and the authorities involved” is aligned, according to the CNI document, to the part of the bill that “guarantees the non-binding nature of the manifestations of the authorities involved, so as not to impede the progress of the administrative process”.
The sector’s mention of the “assessment of the environmental impacts of the enterprise or activity in a concentrated manner” is in line with the passage of the bill that “simplifies environmental licensing procedures for certain sectors, such as linear enterprises, agriculture and sanitation”.
“In the real world and not in the narratives, what the CNI has defended in recent years in the National Congress, together with the Parliamentary Agricultural Front, is the emptying of the assessment of environmental impacts, as well as the inconsequential automation of most of the processes via fast track [via rápida]”, says the former president of Ibama and senior specialist in public policies at the Climate Observatory, Suely Araújo.
“They completely ignore the fact that the Federal Supreme Court has already rejected such a possibility for undertakings with environmental risk in a recent judgment”, he continues.
Asked about the risk of lowering licensing standards resulting in more accidents such as those involving the Vale and Samarco mining dams in Minas Gerais, Bomtempo replied that other instruments should be part of the environmental solution. He cites as an example land tenure regularization, ecological-economic zoning, strategic environmental assessment and payment for environmental services.
“Changing the conceptual model of environmental policy, with emphasis on inductive processes, via stimuli and incentives” is one of the items in the CNI proposal for reviewing the environmental licensing.
“What you can’t work with today is 7,000 regulatory and federal acts. A lot of people talk about 25,000 in the three spheres. I’ve even heard of 50,000 normative acts. plants here in Brazil”, says Bomtempo.
Asked about the number of environmental regulations, Araújo replied that the numbers cited by the CNI are “unrealistic”.
“Standards accounted for like? They will never demonstrate how this creative accounting works. Environmental policy has strong regulatory components in any country in the world”, says Araújo.
The industry proposal also includes a chapter on the low carbon economy, pointing out opportunities for the sector in the bioeconomy (which takes advantage of biodiversity resources contributing to environmental conservation) and in the circular economy (which reduces the demand for raw materials and the generation waste, from recycling and product redesign).
The main recommendation of the chapter is the regulation of a carbon market. With the definition of rules by the federal government, companies must have more legal security to negotiate carbon credits — a kind of “license to pollute”, in which actors with high greenhouse gas emissions can acquire credits generated by those who, in , reduces the amount of these gases released into the atmosphere.
“The industry stands on the side of solutions, especially when defending the consolidation of a regulated carbon market, in opposition to the federal government’s initiative to advance in the regulation of voluntary markets, with less climate integrity”, says Gustavo Pinheiro, coordinator of the portfolio of ICS (Instituto Clima e Sociedade) low carbon economy.
“It is a symptom that the Brazilian industry recognizes the sustainability agenda as a factor of competitiveness and positions itself as part of the solution to the challenges imposed by the climate crisis”, evaluates Pinheiro.
The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.
