IPAM (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia) vehemently repudiates the historic setback represented by the overturning of vetoes to Law 15.190/25, which weakens Environmental Licensing in Brazil. Days after the end of COP30, a milestone in the country’s global leadership in building a more sustainable future, Congress’ decision risks undoing progress made in recent years and puts the lives of millions of people at risk.
“We need to be more efficient with environmental licensing, but never at the cost of insecurity and current and future risks for the population. Have the distinguished senators not understood the message that nature is giving us? COP30, in Belém, makes it clear that we have exceeded our limits. We have to rethink our relationship with our rivers and forests. And it’s not with a rushed and dysfunctional bill that we’ll be more harmonious with the environment we live in,” laments André Guimarães, executive director of IPAM and Special Civil Society Envoy to COP30.
The new law dismantles the state’s capacity to prevent and control damage to the environment and tramples on the right of indigenous peoples to be consulted on projects that could have an impact on their territories. Its approval, which was opaque and not open to debate with civil society, represents the greatest recent threat to environmental conservation, water supply and food security in the country.
More than a defeat for the Presidency, the overturning of the vetoes is a serious disrespect to the Brazilian people and to future generations, who may live in a more hostile and unstable world due to the climate crisis.
Approved by the House of Representatives in July, the law was published with vetoes on 63 of the 400 provisions in the original bill. Among the points vetoed were mechanisms that transferred full responsibility for environmental licensing to states and municipalities, as well as the possibility of simplified licensing for medium-sized polluting projects and the adoption of self-declared licensing.
Although they did not reverse all the damage caused by the law, the presidential vetoes prevented some of the most critical provisions, such as self-licensing and the exclusion of consultations with traditional territories that were still in the process of being regularized. With the overturning of the vetoes, authorizations for harmful projects can be issued by filling out a simple online form.
In addition, peoples who have inhabited the same region for centuries could have their rights violated to make way for deforestation and the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. Despite being the least responsible for the climate crisis and conserving some of the largest remnants of native vegetation in the country, indigenous peoples, quilombolas and traditional communities are once again being ignored in the name of outdated developmentalism, which puts lives and territories at risk.