Environmental conservation body, ICMBio orders to reduce spending by up to 80%

The Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) oriented officials to limit the agency’s activities on the grounds of budgetary restriction.

Areas of the institute have been warned, since last Tuesday (1st), that they should reduce their spending by up to 80%. The measure was reported by the newspaper O Globo and confirmed by the Sheet.

The ICMBio units —which includes Conservation Units (UCs), regional managements and research centers, for example—received an email notifying them that the management committee had demanded the cut.

According to the message, the order is “to cancel all inspection operations that depend on budget resources (daily, tickets, fuel, supplies…) planned for the first half of November.”

The activities carried out to comply with court orders must be “rationalized as much as possible” and all the works, from the second half of the month until the end of the year, have “their execution linked to the existence of resources”.

THE Sheet questioned both the Ministry of Economy and ICMBio, through their respective press offices, to find out the size of the reduction in expenses, the reason and the general impacts of this measure, but had no response until the publication of this text.

According to reports from members of the agency heard by the report this Tuesday (3) on condition of anonymity, the reduction in expenses already puts ICMBio’s work in check, which could become dysfunctional as of next week.

Chiefs reporting to the regional management of the Northeast, for example, were informed that their PAs will have only 20% of the monthly budget released. The message asks that the license plates of the cars that the unit intends to use be sent, so that the release of funds for fuel can be evaluated. There are places where inspection activities are completely paralyzed.

In the Southeast regional management, there are reports that there is no fuel or money for vehicle repairs. The fear of officials is that the agency will be inoperative in the middle of the fire season in some biomes.

Trips to activities that would be held on Friday (4), for example, are being hastily reassessed due to lack of funds. The same was said by people working in the North.

The resources that were not allocated are those that do not depend on the budget, that is, that come from external funds or financiers, for example.

While the agency’s managers are studying how to allocate the little money that remains, they are also trying to negotiate with the government to release the funds.

Recently, the Ministry of the Environment was affected by a spending contingency of around R$6 million, but it is not clear whether the reduction in ICMBio is the result of this measure.

The current president of the institute, Marcos Simanovic, is a former military policeman and his management has been criticized by environmentalists, for having allocated police and military personnel in important positions in the agency and for having carried out a precarious role in the conservation of biodiversity.