julho, 17 2025

By WWF-Brazil 

Overnight on Thursday (the 17th), the National Congress signed the most sweeping permission for environmental destruction in Brazil in the last 40 years. And the damage will be irreversible.

Bill 2159/202, known as the "Devastation Bill," dismantles the country's environmental licensing system, violating constitutional principles and weakening the instruments that protect the environment. This is a decision made without dialogue with society, the impacts of which will be irreversible for people, the climate, and biodiversity. The bill now awaits presidential signature.

Among the absurdities of the bill, self-licensing is particularly blatant, allowing businesses to self-certify, attesting the environmental impacts of their activities by themselves, without due technical analysis by competent bodies.

Another critical point is the Special Environmental License, through which the Government Council, a political body, will define which projects are of national priority and will be eligible for fast-track and simplified licensing. This includes large infrastructure projects, such as oil and gas exploration on the Equatorial Margin, an area of extreme environmental sensitivity, and the paving of highways, which are notably responsible for the deforestation of large areas in the Amazon.

The proposal also exempts licensing requirements for agricultural activities, opening the floodgates to deforestation and pollution, and poses a direct threat to our water security. Water resource management instruments will no longer be linked to potentially polluting and degrading enterprises and activities. This puts at risk the water we drink, which sustains biodiversity and is essential to national agricultural production.

The bill represents a direct assault on the rights of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, the true guardians of Brazil's biomes. By restricting the activities of agencies such as Funai (National Indigenous People Foundation), ICMBio ( Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation), and Iphan (Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute) to officially recognised and titled territories, it ignores thousands of communities undergoing recognition and demarcation processes. Furthermore, it violates the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation, guaranteed by ILO Convention 169, to which Brazil is a signatory.

In a cruel irony, the Devastation Bill overturns important mechanisms of the Atlantic Forest Law on Forest Protection Day, putting the most deforested biome in the country at risk. Furthermore, monitoring of projects will now be based on random sampling and solely on reports from the developers themselves, weakening environmental control by public agencies.

The bill also increases legal uncertainty surrounding private and government projects, and is likely to increase litigation, delays, and socio-environmental conflicts. Several paragraphs of the bill have already been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Federal Court, which demonstrates the text's weakness. Furthermore, the bill defines states and municipalities as having the power to determine which activities are eligible for licensing, fragmenting regulations and reducing transparency, which runs counter to the alleged goal of simplifying environmental licensing.

In the year of COP30, which will be held in Belém, Pará state, in November, Congress chose to pass a “free-for-all legislation”, rather than making progress in tackling the climate crisis. The approval of the Devastation Bill threatens Brazil's leadership in international climate negotiations, in addition to jeopardising commercial partnerships and access to financing that require compliance with socio-environmental safeguards.

It is deeply regrettable that Congress has ignored the warnings of science and the calls of civil society. Now, it's up to President Lula to exercise his responsibility and demonstrate his commitment to the climate, people, and the environment, by vetoing the text in its entirety. It's still possible to avoid an unprecedented tragedy.