President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) defended this Tuesday (18) a government decree that authorizes the destruction of any type of cave for the construction of projects considered to be of public utility.
“This decree is called the cavity decree. If there is an armadillo hole here, if there is a distance of 10, 20 meters, you can’t do anything. So you can’t do anything all over Brazil. grow, man,” the president told supporters.
Opposition deputies presented a bill to overturn the new rule. Experts also criticize the text.
Bolsonaro’s statement was released by a Bolsonarista YouTube page. To defend the text, the president read the headline of the leaf –”Bolsonaro’s decree releases destroying cave to build enterprise”- about the publication of the decree and showed it to supporters.
“This decree will help a lot in Minas Gerais”, he said.
The decree could facilitate the construction of a Heineken brewery factory in Minas Gerais, which was embargoed in September last year by ICMBio (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade) for risk of damage to the archaeological site where Luzia’s skull was located, the oldest human fossil found in the Americas. In December, the company withdrew from the project.
Works on highways with interference in caves may also be facilitated.
Bolsonaro’s decree was signed on the 13th and maintains the classifications of relevance of natural cavities at maximum, high, medium and low, but revokes a 1990 rule that prohibited caves with a maximum degree of relevance from suffering irreversible negative impacts.
According to the new text, they can be modified as long as there is authorization from the competent environmental agencies and environmental compensation by the entrepreneurs. In addition, the impacts will not be able to generate the extinction of the species that inhabit the impacted cavity.
In a note, the Ministry of the Environment justified the need for the change and stated that they “create the possibility of investments in fundamental structuring projects, generating employment and income, such as highways, railways, mining, transmission lines and renewable energies”.
Specialists in the area, however, criticize the decree. They say the new rules jeopardize the protection of natural cavities.
“The decision will be directly related to the eventual framing that the public power gives of public utility and there is a certain amplitude of what can be considered as public utility. In federal and state works, where the environmental agency is the wolf and the lamb, there are great chances of there being risks of arbitrating on public utility in the wrong way”, says Murilo Valle, PhD in hydrogeology and member of the Bambuà Group for Speleological Research.
Sebeq (Brazilian Society for the Study of Chiroptera) also took a stand against the changes and stated that they will generate “huge and irreparable impacts”
“Literally thousands of cave-dwelling species, including critically endangered species and hyperendemic species (occurring in a single cave, for example) are at increased risk with the publication of Decree 10935. Beyond that, ecosystem services provided by these caves, for example, the supply of aquifers and the containment of flood pulses, could be seriously compromised”, said the entity in a note.
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