Environmental and indigenous activists condemn plan they say would threaten indigenous territories and make compliance with Paris deal impossible

Environmentalists and indigenous rights campaigners have attacked efforts by the Brazilian government to roll back laws protecting the environment and indigenous territories, warning the moves could have disastrous consequences and even threaten the country’s ability to meet its commitments under the Paris climate deal.

The two initiatives include a bill that critics say would dismantle environmental licensing laws and a draft government decree campaigners say threatens existing and future indigenous territories. Coming after a recently announced 29% jump in Amazon deforestation, they have caused widespread alarm.

The moves represent “the most worrying regressions of our recent history”, said Mauricio Guetta, a lawyer for Socio-Environmental Institute, a Brazilian non-governmental group.

“If approved, they will certainly make it impossible for Brazil to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement,” he said.

In ratifying the Paris agreement, Brazil committed to cut 37% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and end illegal deforestation by 2030.

The bill to overhaul Brazil’s rigorous environmental licensing laws has been stalled for more than a decade. But an amended version is now being guided by Mauro Pereira, a congressman from President Michel Temer’s centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement party.

It proposes replacing standard environmental licensing procedures established by central government with a quicker, more flexible system in which different Brazilian states can decide which licences projects should have. Some companies can even supply their own licences. And in some cases the licence is exempted – including some agricultural activities, temporary works and electricity transmission lines.

Mauro Pereira said some licences took up to a decade to clear and that Brazil is losing business to neighbouring countries that have faster procedures.

“Our country needs clear laws, and laws that value the environment and value people,” Pereira said.

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About 250 organizations and individuals, including non-government groups and environmental prosecutors, disagreed. They have signed a letter condemning the bill, arguing it could increase the risk of environmental disasters like one caused when a tailings dam burst in Mariana, flooding the Brazilian countryside with millions of litres of mining waste.

Suely Araújo, president of Brazil’s government environment agency, Ibama, said the proposal to let states and cities decide their own environmental licensing could lead to an “environmental war” as states competed to attract industries by offering looser licensing.

“The danger is very real and very bad for environmental protection,” Araújo said.

Brazil’s environment minister, José Sarney Filho, has also attacked the bill. His ministry is one of 13 that have almost finished a detailed proposal to reform licensing laws which has the support of Ibama and environmentalists.

An open letter by Sarney Filho to Temer’s chief of staff, Eliseu Padilho, attacked Pereira’s bill and defended the detailed new blueprint his ministry helped draw up.

“The environmental regression of this measure would be immense,” Sarney Filho said in the letter, noting that 52% of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions came from agriculture and the use of land and forests.

Pereira said that those attacking proposals to let states and cities handle their own licensing were insulting the capability of those working in local government.

“They want to say that only they are intelligent and only they know,” he said. “We have intelligent and cultured people in all the states and cities. Minister Sarney Filho and his team have to respect all these people.”

Opposition lawmakers said the new threat shows how vulnerable the government of Michel Temer is to pressure from a powerful block of pro-agribusiness lawmakers – the so-called ruralista bloc – whose support he needs to pass unpopular austerity measures.

With Brazil in the third year of a debilitating recession, Temer made economic recovery the principle aim of the government he formed when the leftist president Dilma Rousseff was suspended for an impeachment trial. Temer was Rousseff’s vice-president. She has since been ousted and has denounced him as a traitor and her impeachment as a coup d’état.

“It is a weak government and the ruralista block is very strong,” said Edmílson Rodrigues, a lawmaker from the leftist Socialism and Freedom party whose manoeuvres helped stop the environmental licensing bill from passing a crucial finance committee vote last week.

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These are not the only measures that Brazil’s conservative congress is trying to approve.

The ruralista bloc also has its eye on the country’s indigenous reserves.

A constitutional amendment to transfer control over their demarcation from the executive to the legislature is poised for a vote in the lower house. And campaigners say a draft decree apparently drawn up by the justice ministry and published by local media threatens both new and existing indigenous reserves.

The draft decree stipulates that only areas occupied by indigenous groups in 1988, when Brazil’s constitution was signed, would be eligible to become new reserves – ruling out anywhere indigenous people had been expelled from. Indigenous groups claiming lands already occupied could be compensated in other ways instead.

Mineral or water resources on indigenous reserves could be exploited with indigenous peoples sharing in mining income – though this would need congress’s approval – and communications networks, roads and “strategic energy alternatives” installed in existing indigenous lands without even consulting the communities involved or the government agency responsible.