Brazilian lawmakers seek to decimate green laws one week after hosting climate summit

BRASÍLIA — Brazilian lawmakers are pushing a historic rollback of environmental rules that would strip protections from the Amazon — less than a week after the country wraps up hosting the U.N. climate talks.

Since last week, Brazil has welcomed representatives from almost 200 countries to this year’s U.N. climate talks in the Amazonian city of Belém. The country has used the conference to showcase President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s success in slashing deforestation rates in the world’s most important rainforest.

But 1,600 kilometers farther south in the capital Brasília, Lula’s opponents have a different agenda — and they are planning to use the moment after the summit ends to push through a series of changes to the law that Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva told POLITICO would amount to a “severe weakening of Brazil’s environmental rules.”

The move exposes the balance of power in Brazil, where the leftist president is faced with a Congress dominated by politicians aligned with industrial interest groups, particularly the agriculture sector.

Lula’s opponents are seeking to use their majority in the Congress to ram through changes that would hand companies the power to conduct their own environmental checks to gain the licenses needed to operate potentially destructive new projects designated “medium impact.” This could include dams, mines, industrial plants and oil and gas production.

The licensing of large infrastructure projects could be authorized by a different process, called “special environmental licensing.” Projects deemed as strategic would be fast tracked, bypassing environmental checks. Also, the farming sector would largely be exempted from environmental planning oversight.

Another proposal would strip Indigenous oversight of projects that affect their traditional lands. This change would affect Brazil’s Amazon region, around a quarter of which is managed by Indigenous people.

Silva said that passing these into law “would be a setback that dismantles policies consolidated over decades … creating loopholes that would allow high-impact projects to bypass essential technical analyses, putting at risk entire river basins, biomes and the communities that depend on these territories for their livelihoods.”

Lula’s veto

Both houses have already passed the law once, with large majorities. But in August, Lula struck down 63 of the most environmentally damaging aspects of the bill, which include the aforementioned provisions, while signing the rest into law.

The Congress can overturn some or all of Lula’s vetoes with a majority in both houses and he would not be able to veto again. On Wednesday, senators indicated they wanted to hold a vote in both houses of Congress on Nov. 27 on the vetoes — only six days after diplomats are scheduled to leave Belém.

The Congress is likely to repeat its previous vote and overturn the president’s vetoes, said Suely Araújo, the former president of Brazil’s government forest protection agency, now a public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory NGO.

“I really don’t think that Lula has power enough to stop this,” she said, adding:“I’m sure that we will have problems of deforestation increasing” if the vetoes are struck down. This view was echoed in a report by two of Brazil’s leading experts in environmental management who said it would “generate significant environmental degradation.”

Araújo said environmental groups were planning to take the issue to the Supreme Court. Mauricio Guetta, legal policy director at the campaign group Avaaz, said it would be “the worst environmental setback in our history.”

POLITICO contacted two lawmakers who support agribusiness, plus the Instituto Pensar Agropecuária, a non-profit group that represents the sector. None responded to requests to comment for this article.

Mato Grosso do Sul Governor Eduardo Riedel, from one of Brazil’s center-right opposition parties, reportedly told an event at the COP30 climate conference that the General Environmental Permitting Law, as it is known, reformed the planning system in a way that was vital for delivering projects at speed.

“Society increasingly demands increasingly agile responses due to the magnitude of development and growth so it is also not an obstacle to development,” said Riedel.

Amazon on the brink

The stakes are global. Large scale deforestation and climate change are pushing the Amazon toward a tipping point that scientists warn could see the forest’s rain cycle collapse. This would lead to increased fires and, eventually, replacement of the trees that store huge quantities of carbon, with grasslands. This would, in turn, accelerate global warming with consequences everywhere.

Coming just days after Brazil’s Amazon climate conference, passing the reforms wholesale would show Brazil had “regressed,” said Nilto Tatto, a member of Congress from Lula’s Workers Party. “It’s very bad for Brazil’s image. It’s very bad because of everything that the COP here in Belém represents.” Silva said the potential rollback “undermines the international commitments Brazil has assumed, including those related to the Paris Agreement.”

Tatto added that it could have implications for trade with the European Union, which has sought to regulate its supply chains to discourage environmental harms.

The government could try to delay the vote, which has already been pushed back once, partly to avoid colliding with the U.N. talks.

Lula arrived at COP30 with a strong record on stamping out deforestation that soared under his rightwing predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. But the current administration has needed to balance Lula’s promises of environmental protection in Belém and the political and economic reality of Brazil. Next year, Lula will stand for a fourth term as president against an as yet unknown candidate, who will likely be drawn from the hard right and would almost certainly walk away from efforts to protect the environment.

Just ahead of COP30, Lula’s government approved new oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon River, while Lula has backed a 900-kilometer highway redevelopment that environmental and Indigenous groups say would provide access for extractive industries and threaten huge new areas of forest.

“They are very weak,” Araújo said of the government.

Aitor Hernández-Morales contributed reporting from Brussels.