Sara Leal*
The new edition of the newsletter Um Grau e Meio talks about environmental licensing. This instrument aims to ensure that potentially polluting activities or undertakings, or those that use natural resources, are planned and carried out in such a way as to minimize and compensate for their impact on the environment.
In an interview, IPAM Public Policy researcher Clarisse Touguinha Guerreiro explains the opportunities for improving environmental licensing in the Legal Amazon.
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What are the biggest challenges facing environmental licensing in the Legal Amazon?
From 2022 to 2024, IPAM mapped environmental licensing flows and processes in eight of the nine states of the Legal Amazon. A total of 53 workshops and meetings were held. We identified 128 opportunities for improvement at state level alone.
Most of these are due to the need for technological improvements, such as the digitization of physical documents; the development or improvement of state licensing systems; as well as the possibility of integration with federal systems, such as Sinaflor [National System for Controlling the Origin of Forest Products] or Sicar [Rural Environmental Registration System].
Another need is to update regulations, such as the challenge of the lack of human resources to analyze the environmental licensing process and continuous training of the existing staff.
There are also problems related to communication with the intervening bodies [other institutions that are consulted throughout the process] and with the entrepreneurs.
These challenges, present not only in the Legal Amazon, can contribute to greater complexity and longer processes, which in turn stimulates legislative proposals, such as PL 2159/2021, which seek to promote the ‘simplification’ of environmental licensing.
And what are the opportunities in this context?
In terms of the Legal Amazon, the survey carried out by IPAM identified 24 successful experiences that should be shared among the region’s states in order to overcome common challenges.
We supported the formation of ReLA (Rede Licencia Amazônia), created in December 2024 and made up of technicians from the institutes and secretariats responsible for environmental licensing in the region.
Generally speaking, although licensing needs to be improved and lacks a General Law, it is an important land-use planning instrument that is well consolidated in Brazil and regulated by infra-legal norms.
Among the opportunities that have not been taken advantage of is integration with the ZEE [Ecological-Economic Zoning]. In this way, the public authorities would be able to make better decisions regarding their territorial planning.
Another opportunity would be to combine this with SEA [Strategic Environmental Assessment], which is widely used in other countries – and is even a recommendation from the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] to Brazil.
The adoption of SEA for the creation of policies, plans and programs would provide very important guidelines for environmental licensing, in relation to certain regions and sectors of the economy.
One example is the current discussion about oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon: this debate was not supposed to take place in the context of environmental licensing, but through an SEA, more specifically an SEA [Environmental Assessment of Sedimentary Areas], which would assess the entire unexplored basin, as Professor Sánchez has already proposed.
Another opportunity is to take a look at climate change within environmental licensing, so that the decisions made within the process are aligned not only with the climate commitments made by the country, but also to ensure that the works are resilient to the impacts of climate extremes and do not jeopardize the adaptation of the local community.
It is important to point out that our National Climate Change Policy already links the two themes (climate change and project impact assessment) but, in practice, this is done occasionally by a few states, and in a very concentrated way on aspects of climate mitigation.
With the climate urgency we have today, we could use environmental licensing, which is already this robust, well-established public policy, as an instrument to ground the fight against climate change and take care of local adaptation.
What has IPAM done to contribute in this area?
In addition to the actions already mentioned, an analysis is underway on how the states of the Legal Amazon and the federal government could include climate variables within their environmental licensing.
In addition, IPAM recently carried out an analysis of public databases, both federal and state in the Legal Amazon, of documents that authorize legal deforestation, such as the ASV [Vegetation Suppression Authorization] and the AUAS [Alternative Land Use Authorization].
Based on the results of this analysis, we contributed recommendations to a proposal for a CONAMA [National Environment Council] resolution, which was in public consultation, and which aims to establish criteria for issuing these documents.
The initiative of this CONAMA resolution proposes a series of important measures, in particular the requirement to analyze the CAR in order to issue a vegetation suppression permit.
Based on the analysis carried out, we suggest the unification of the databases; the inclusion of an automatic information validation stage to avoid data inconsistencies; and the requirement that the annual publication of vegetation suppression data, to be carried out by the states, be accompanied by a geospatial file and linked to the authorization number.
*Communications Coordinator
