Scientists, business leaders, and environmentalists call licensing bill worst environmental rollback in Brazilian history
07/17/2025
In the entirety of Bill 2,159/2021—legislation designed to overhaul Brazil’s environmental licensing process—the word “climate” does not appear once. This omission serves as a telling indicator of the bill’s intent. Proponents, especially conservative factions within agribusiness, mining, and industry, frame the bill as a modernization effort. But its complete disregard for the ongoing climate emergency signals a step backward, enshrining outdated principles and representing, according to environmentalists and scientists, one of the most severe socio-environmental regressions in the country’s history.
“Apparently, climate isn’t considered relevant for a law that’s fundamental to Brazil’s environmental protection system,” says Suely Araújo, former president of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) and current public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory, Brazil’s largest coalition of organizations focused on climate and development. “It’s shameful, especially in 2025. This is a law designed to be obsolete from birth.”
The Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) is among the many civil society organizations—including industry and commerce groups alongside environmentalists, Indigenous peoples, Quilombola communities, and other traditional groups—opposing what they call the “Destruction Bill.” Backed by over 160 organizations, SBPC issued a manifesto outlining the bill’s effects according to scientific consensus: it weakens the mechanisms for analyzing, controlling, and supervising potentially destructive and polluting projects.
Of Brazil’s six major biomes, four—Amazon, Cerrado, Pantanal, and Caatinga—are approaching irreversible tipping points. “Crossing these thresholds could trigger ecological collapse, destroying ecosystem services essential to life,” scientists warn. They recommend halting native vegetation destruction, combating wildfires and environmental degradation, and urgently scaling up restoration efforts. These recommendations stand in stark contrast to the bill’s deregulatory agenda.
The criticisms don’t stop there. In addition to endangering key biomes, the bill undermines the Atlantic Forest Law—protecting a biome that has already lost 76% of its original cover—and is incompatible with Brazil’s climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. Its approval would also undercut Brazil’s leadership aspirations ahead of COP30, scheduled for November in Belém.
Critics point to several dangerous and controversial provisions. The bill exempts a wide range of agricultural activities from environmental licensing, regardless of their environmental impact. It shifts responsibility onto developers by allowing medium-sized projects with moderate pollution potential to receive automatic approval based on self-declaration. Even worse, oversight of these licenses would rely on random sampling.
Such provisions may sound plausible in an ideal world—not in Brazil, where efforts are ongoing to protect standing forests, enforce environmental laws, and safeguard Indigenous and Quilombola communities from forced displacement caused by infrastructure projects.
The bill also excludes important input from non-licensing agencies such as Funai (the Indigenous affairs agency), ICMBio (biodiversity conservation), and Iphan (cultural heritage). Moreover, it detaches licensing from water usage rights, ignoring crises like those in the Cerrado, where over half of municipalities have seen surface water supplies drop by 30%. Nearly 80% of Quilombola territories and 32% of Indigenous lands—awaiting legal recognition—would be disregarded in the licensing process.
Researchers Júlia Benfica Senra and Gesmar Rosa dos Santos highlight further risks. The bill presumes state and municipal authorities have the capacity to assess environmental impacts, which is far from the case. “The bill recognizes real deficiencies in the system but exacerbates them,” says Ms. Senra. “It lowers the bar when it should be raising it.”
*By Daniela Chiaretti — São Paulo
Source: Valor International
https://valorinternational.globo.com/