Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 104, May 2021, 105384
Land Use Policy

Actions against sustainability: Dismantling of the environmental policies in Brazil

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105384Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Countries with mega-diversity harbours a large natural capital.

  • Despite this importance, we are assisting a tentative to weakness the environmental laws in Brazil.

  • The dismantling has local, regional and worldwide consequences.

Abstract

Environmental laws are necessary to governance and a sustainable use of nature resource. Brazil federal environmental laws have been improved in the last 50 years, with significant advances in legal provisions and monitoring systems. However, the recent dismantling of legal environmental framework by the Bolsonaro administration has led to increase of human pressure on biodiversity and ecosystems. The purpose of this article is to present some environmental impacts in Brazil due to the dismantling of environmental laws. To address this, some examples we gathered and established a timeline of Brazilian environmental laws to allow a perspective of temporal dismantling. Among the environmental impacts related to the dismantling of environmental policies are the increase in deforestation in the Amazon, the release of pesticides, and the lack of actions to minimize the effects of oil spill. In conclusion, the current Brazilian federal govern is dismantling environment laws, and the consequent lack of environmental governance in the country, will result in severe negative impacts to the biodiversity and human well-being.

Introduction

In democratic societies reliable legal system are more common than in autocratic ones (Li and Reuveny, 2006), and consequently environmental governance and compliance is expected in democracies. This is mainly pivotal in megadiverse countries, where natural resources can be a plentiful capital and important for human well-fare including socio-economic issues (Díaz et al., 2015, Pelicice et al., 2017).

As expected, and argued by scientists before the elections (Magnusson et al., 2018) Bolsonaro administration started a setback way of a long-time Brazilian environmental positive policy through changing federal environmental laws. Since 1965, Brazilian federal environmental laws registered successive advances associated with the increase of the legal devices and monitoring systems (Fig. 1 blue sequence) based on popular participation and expertise advice. For more than 50 years there was a large and cumulative interest of Brazilian society to improve federal environmental law, generating a gradual strengthening of environmental preservation mechanisms. Launched in 2012 to replace the Forest Code of 1965, the Native Vegetation Protection Law of Brazil has positive and negative consequences to the environment (Brancalion et al., 2016). In the same way, the Biodiversity Law although regulates the access to genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, its increased bureaucracy and hamper necessary research on biodiversity (Alves et al., 2018). Because these both laws are controversial, they are exhibited in grey colour at Fig. 1.

With a large Protected Area system, Brazil had a protagonist role as a worldwide leader in environmental governance for two decades. However, there was a clear tentative to weakness environmental legal framework since 2014 (Ferreira et al., 2014), and also a cut-off funding of research to environmental monitoring (Magnusson et al., 2018) and a reduced public spending in federal Protected Areas between 2013 and 2016 (Silva et al., 2019). This tentative of changes in environmental laws was presented as a current proposal in form of Law Proposal “PL” (proposta de lei in Portuguese) but it did not turn a federal law. In fact, such dismantling of environmental legal framework began in 2019, promoted the increase of the human pressure on the biodiversity and ecosystems across the country. This process has been facilitated by the weakening of legal environmental framework and, under the leadership of the current Minister of Environment of Bolsonaro administration, launched a sequence of federal laws clearly against the nature preservation (Fig. 1 red sequence).

Among the consequences, medium and long-term effects on habitat and species loss are expected, with major damage to Brazilian biodiversity, and therefore, to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems functioning. These are some of the consequences of the decrease in legal inspection devices, the dismantling of environmental inspection and control agencies, and the reduction of 96–23 members of popular participation mechanisms in agencies such as National Council of Environment (CONAMA in Portuguese acronym) (Thomaz et al., 2020). This is part of the strategy to close space for dialogue. The article 225 of the Brazilian Constitution clearly describes the role of the Federal government and the Brazilian people in environmental defence and preservation. However, the absence of commitment to environmental conservation of the current federal government exposes the failure to comply with these principles, including the lack of maintenance of environmental conservation policies, climate agreements, and combat Amazon deforestation. Below follow some details of recent examples gathered from the literature.

Section snippets

Increase of Amazon deforestation and weakening of the legal regulations

In 2020, Deforestation in the Amazon had the highest percentage increase in the last 10 years, with a peak in last April in the State of Pará, according to data provided by the Deforestation Alert System (SAD) (Fonseca et al., 2020) and that was criticized by Brazilian government (Escobar, 2019b). Besides the irreparable biodiversity loss, deforestation progress has serious consequences on a global scale, such as a higher incidence of droughts and climate extremes, and increased CO2 release (

The pesticides release: would that be a good strategy to improve crop production?

This step backwards in the conservation politics encouraged an increase of the pressure for expansion of the agriculture frontiers (such as corn, maze, soy), livestock (cattle ranching), and other predatory activities, promoting serious changes in agriculture production. Hence, since the beginning of the current government, approximately 551 pesticides have been released, of which 30–35% are considered potentially carcinogenic by international regulatory agencies and prohibited by the European

Effectiveness of the combat of environmental crisis: oil spill and other harmful substances

The recent and constant failures in the coordination and management of environmental crises, as well as steep investment reductions, were evidenced during the episode of the oil spill that contaminated the Brazilian coast in 2019. In this case, even with the occurrence of high contamination levels, the Contingency Plan for Oil Pollution Incidents was not activated, although it was provided for by law (Decree No. 8127 of October 22, 2013). Thus, the gradual weakening of the Risk Management and

Uncontrolled fire in Pantanal

Pantanal is the largest wetlands of the Earth and houses of Ramsar sites (https://www.ramsar.org/wetland/brazil) and it is has been severely burned recently. Between January and August of 2020 around 12% of this Biome was destroyed by fires. Meteorologists argued that fires were intensifying in 2020 due to higher temperatures and little rainfall, and this can be worse with the forecast of a temperature rise of up to 7 °C by the end of this century (Marengo et al., 2015).

In Pantanal it is common

CRediT authorship contribution statement

LGB and CEVG conceived the manuscript; LGB compiled the data; and LGB, CEVG and MASA wrote the manuscript.

Acknowledgments

Authors had grants from CNPq (Produtividade em Pesquisa numbers 306579/2018-9 to MASA and 311674/2019/4 to CEVG) and FAPERJ (CNE process E-26/202.835/2018 to MASA). Also, we thanks support from Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia – Ecologia, Evolução e Conservação da Biodiversidade, and PPBio/CNPq/MCTic. The Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC, in Portuguese) to support through the Environmental Working Group.

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