License or release? The silent risk behind the Environmental Licensing Bill - BRAZIL OPINION June 9, 2025
- Ana Cunha-Busch
- Jun 8
- 3 min read
Image: Gabriela Biló/Folhapress
License or release? The silent risk behind the Environmental Licensing Bill BRAZIL OPINION
June 9, 2025
By Claudia Andrade
As Brazil prepares to host COP30, many of us are excited about the opportunity to show the world that we have what it takes to lead the global climate agenda. But there is a bill advancing quietly through Congress that could turn this expectation into a contradiction.
I am referring to Bill 2.159/2021, which proposes to establish the so-called General Environmental Licensing Law. And although its initial proposal is to organize and simplify the licensing process in the country—something that is clearly in need of improvement—the text currently under consideration goes much further than that: it threatens to dismantle the pillars that sustain Brazilian environmental policy.
This is not an exaggerated alarm. It is the critical reading of those who live the day-to-day reality of socio-environmental projects, who listen to communities, monitor indicators, and face, often with their own hands, the effects of fragile or poorly implemented public policies.
What is at stake is not just a new law. It is a structural change in the way Brazil views the role of the state in environmental protection.
What the bill proposes—and what it could cause
Among the most controversial points are:
The creation of the License by Adhesion and Commitment (LAC), which allows “low-impact” projects to be licensed by self-declaration, without prior technical analysis.
The total exemption from licensing for certain public works considered “of strategic interest.”
The possibility of a single license, eliminating fundamental steps such as prior analysis and subsequent control.
The automatic renewal of licenses, even without updated assessments of the real impacts of a project.
In practice, these changes could turn environmental licensing into a mere bureaucratic ritual — or worse, an automatic seal of approval.
Those who have worked in the field, like me, know how much a good license protects. It is more than just paper. It is an ethical barrier between the project and the territory. It is what forces entrepreneurs to look at the impacts, dialogue with communities, respect ecological limits, and consider alternatives.
Making this process more flexible, especially without strict and clear criteria, opens the door to irreversible actions, especially in a country like ours, where we still face illegal deforestation, land grabbing, mining on indigenous lands, and environmental vulnerability that intensifies with every extreme weather event.
In the name of haste, we could lose decades of progress
Some argue that the new law “unlocks” projects and accelerates investment. But it is worth asking: unlocks for whom? Accelerates what? And at what cost?
In a country where environmental rights have been hard won, often after disasters such as Mariana and Brumadinho, relaxing licensing is like walking blindfolded on a road already full of scars.
And this is the moment when Brazil presents itself to the world as the host of COP30—the same nation that, amid global climate collapse, may authorize the destruction of sensitive areas based on self-declarations, silence affected communities, and ignore science in the name of agility.
That is why the advancement of this bill has generated outrage.
Not only among environmentalists, but among educators, scientists, public managers, engineers, lawyers, students, quilombolas, indigenous peoples, and mothers of children with respiratory diseases aggravated by pollution. The outrage is because this bill violates a common sense of justice: that the environment is a collective good, not a variable to be adjusted to facilitate profit.
And if it is approved as is, we cannot say that it was due to a lack of warning. There is still time. And there are ways.
We can pressure lawmakers, demand that they listen to technical and popular voices, participate in public hearings, share reliable and accessible information, and strengthen organizations that monitor and act in defense of the environment.
More than ever, it is time to activate our role as citizens who do not accept setbacks disguised as modernization.
The question that won't go away
If the function of licensing is to protect the present and the future, why are we so willing to dismantle it? Who benefits when care becomes an obstacle? And who pays the price when the damage becomes permanent?
Environmental licensing is not an obstacle. It is a foundation.
And if it falls, what will we have left?
@cauvic2
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