Brazil delivers destruction on Environment Week
Host country of COP30 sees its political class threaten the climate with dismantling of environmental licensing, highway for land grabbers, mega oil auction — and rising deforestation
OC — There is nothing to celebrate this Environment Week, except for the success of public demonstrations for the environment held on Sunday (June 1st). Brazil is moving towards a series of environmental setbacks: the dismantling of environmental licensing in Congress, the imminent oil drillig in the mouth of the Amazon River, and the potential paving of a highway that cuts through one of the most pristine stretches of the Amazon, along with dozens of other threats such as direct attacks on Indigenous rights.
It’s the perfect combo to wipe out environmental protections and Indigenous land demarcations in the country, accelerate the tipping point of the world’s largest tropical forest, and set off a carbon bomb against the global climate. All is happening in the year when Brazil is set to host COP30.
What is already bad could still get worse. The significant drop in Amazon deforestation rates in 2023 and 2024 is the main achievement of the current administration’s environmental policy. But it is under pressure. Official, though still partial, data show an increase in deforestation in May. Without a reversal of this trend in June and July, Brazil will arrive at COP30 with a rise in devastation and having failed to meet its target of reducing planet-wrecking greenhouse gas emissions. It will be hard to hold the other 196 countries accountable (not to mention the infrastructure problems already threatening the conference, with complaints from delegations and difficulties in civil society participation).
The destruction of the environmental agenda is a political service delivered by the worst Congress in Brazil’s history. But it also bears the fingerprints of the Executive Branch — at the very least, of its omission. Either the government starts to act decisively to protect environmental legislation, or it will be complicit in its dismantling. The moment of truth is now. If the Speaker of the House, Hugo Motta, does not block the bill that ends environmental licensing and impact assessments, President Lula will have to veto it in its entirety, for partial changes will not fix what is the worst environmental legislative rollback in Brazilian history.
And it’s not just about licensing. There are dozens of bills with extremely serious rollbacks in the so-called “Destruction Package”, some moving quickly through Congress. Last week, the Senate passed a bill that dismantles the current model for Indigenous Lands (TIs) demarcation and suspended the demarcation of two TIs in Santa Catarina, an unprecedented and unconstitutional act. Congress will not stop.
Political pressure from lawmakers and the government for a drilling license at the mouth of the Amazon River is only increasing. The National Petroleum Agency (ANP) has included 47 blocks in the same sedimentary basin in the auction scheduled for June 17th, along with several others in new exploratory frontiers in regions with high environmental sensitivity. This includes blocks in the Potiguar Basin that the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change tried to withdraw from the auction due to their location in the Fernando de Noronha seamount chain, which is ecologically connected to the archipelago and the Rocas Atoll.
Congress is also pushing for the paving of more than 400 km of BR-319, originally carved through the forest without environmental licensing in the 1970s during the military dictatorship. The project is supported by the Ministry of Transport and is moving towards implementation under the Lula administration. Ibama has taken no steps to suspend the highway’s preliminary license — a null act from the Bolsonaro administration that claimed the project was socio-environmentally viable, contradicting technical positions from within the agency itself that predict a significant increase in deforestation as a result.
With just five months to go until COP30, the country should be united around an agenda to combat the climate crisis. The so-called contradictions of the broad coalition elected in 2022 to defeat the coup plotters who deliberately sought to destroy Ibama, the Amazon, and Brazilian democracy, cannot result in a broad coalition against the environment.
Environment minister Marina Silva was attacked in the Senate last week by defenders of the coup and supporters of environmental crimes. She responded with courage. The Lula government must choose which side it is on.
