Minister Ricardo Lewandowski, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), suspended this Monday (24) excerpts from a decree by President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) that authorizes the destruction of any type of cave for the construction of projects considered to be of public utility.
The suspension affects two articles of the decree. One of them authorizes undertakings that maintain ecological balance in the places, “regardless of their degree of relevance”.
Another allowed “irreversible negative impacts” in the absence of viable alternatives for public utility activities, as long as there were compensatory measures and they did not lead to species extinctions.
For Lewandowski, the provisions of the decree “threaten natural areas still untouched by suppressing the protection hitherto existing, otherwise constitutionally guaranteed”.
He says that the permission, “among other negative aspects”, that caves of maximum relevance suffer impacts as long as certain conditions are met are “incompatible – given their conspicuous vagueness – with the imperative of protecting this natural heritage belonging not only to Brazilians”. , but humanity itself as a whole”.
“[O decreto] created a real setback in the country’s environmental legislation, by allowing -under the cloak of an apparent legality- that negative impacts, of an irreversible nature, affect caves considered to be of maximum environmental relevance, as well as their area of ​​influence, a possibility that is expressly prohibited by the norm. previous year”, the minister said in his decision.
Lewandowski highlights that the area of ​​influence of an underground cavity is an important source of nutrients and ecosystems and also the place where species responsible for the entry of food into caves, such as bats, live.
It also says that the concept of “public utility” mentioned by the new rule is “legally indeterminate” and confers, “due to its breadth and generality, an excessively broad discretionary power to government agents responsible for authorizing these activities with clear predatory potential”.
​Based on assessments by scientists, the minister says that the exploration of caves can lead to the disappearance of geological formations that include the remains of extinct animals and traces of prehistoric occupations.
“And that’s not all: the possible damage to archaeological sites sheltered in caves can even negatively impact the study of the evolution of the human species”, he says.
In addition, Lewandowski points out that groundwater resources can be compromised with the destruction of these caves.
The suspension determined by the minister is valid until the final judgment, which he says must be done in plenary, by all the ministers of the STF.
Last week, President Jair Bolsonaro defended the decree. “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.
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.
Road works with interference in caves could also be facilitated by the measure.
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.
.
