Brazil May End Illegal Deforestation By Legalizing It, Experts Warn; Actions To Date Bear Them Out
At the COP26 climate summit last month, when Brazilian Environment Minister Joaquim Leite announced the country would update its climate goals to include zero illegal deforestation by 2028 (replacing the previous pledge for 2030), local environmentalists, researchers and policy specialists expressed skepticism. Their concern, conveyed on social media and in news interviews, was that the country would legalize deforestation that is illegal today. “If all deforestation is legal, then you have zeroed illegal deforestation quite successfully,” says Suely Araújo, senior public policy specialist at Observatório do Clima, a civil society coalition focused on climate change.
The suspicion is not unfounded. In April, a day after promising to double investments for combating deforestation at U.S. President Joe Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro approved a cut in the environment ministry’s budget by 24% from the 2020 allocation. The move shrank what was already a meager budget, making the environment ministry’s 2021 budget the smallest in two decades, according to a report from Observatório do Clima.
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Furthermore, bills currently before the Brazilian parliament threaten to weaken environmental policy even further, Araújo and Unterstell say. “If they come into force, these proposals can set dangerous precedents and foster statutory insecurity for those who abide by the law,” Unterstell says. One of these bills, known as PL 2633/20, addresses land tenure legislation. It aims to expand the area of public lands that can be regularized without undergoing an inspection by any authority. Under this bill, the decision to grant tenure over a parcel of land would be based on documental analysis and on a declaration from the petitioner saying they respect environmental legislation.
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She says another bill that would be a hard blow to environmental legislation in Brazil is PL 3729/2004, which aims to reformulate environmental licensing. “We do need to standardize how licensing is done in Brazil, but this proposal seeks just to remove barriers for businesses to operate, not to set up a solid, serious environmental law. It sees licensing as a hurdle,” Araújo says. She adds the bill would exempt 14 types of businesses from licensing requirements, “with ambiguous [wording] that could cause trouble in the future, that includes almost every kind of construction, from a gully on a road to a dam like Belo Monte.”
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https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/to-end-illegal-deforestation-brazil-may-legalize-it-entirely-experts-warn/
