Insufficient funding and manpower have always dogged Ibama, the enforcement and permitting arm of Brazil’s Environment Ministry. But green advocates say recently issued regulations and a newly passed Senate bill will hamper the agency further by restricting its ability to regulate development projects.

With the Senate-approved legislation awaiting President Dilma Rousseff’s signature, the most immediate focus of attention earlier this month was the new set of Environment Ministry regulations, issued on Oct. 28. The measures were meant to “increase the speed of licensing without jeopardizing its quality,” said Curt Trennepohl, the president of Ibama. Separately, the Environment Ministry attributed the changes in part to “a 700% increase in the number of environmental licenses granted in the past seven years.”

Licensing requests have grown largely due to a huge government-sponsored economic expansion initiative called Growth Acceleration Program (Pac), which features infrastructure projects ranging from the construction of hydroelectric dams and highways to ports and deepwater oil and gas wells. Begun in 2007, the program generated US$354 billion in project spending in its first four-year phase. It calls for $533 billion in additional work from 2011 to 2014, and $351 billion from 2015 to 2018.

Reining in requests

The new regulations are specifically targeted to speed Ibama’s licensing of Pac work—especially projects experiencing licensing delays. One regulation drawing particular attention states that in analyzing a request to license a project, Ibama may now only ask the developer once for additional information. Currently, Ibama sometimes makes multiple requests for information when it thinks project sponsors have failed to address potential environmental-impact issues. And under the new rules, Ibama cannot ask for additional information beyond 60 days of receiving the license request. “This [regulation] should end the story that Ibama is to blame for licensing delays,” said Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira.

Green advocates, however, charge the rules undermine Ibama’s already shaky oversight. Says Sergio Leitão, public policy coordinator for Greenpeace Brazil. “If Ibama, with its back against the wall, has to choose between approving or denying a license for a major infrastructure project, it will cede to government pressure and approve the license even more quickly than in the past. True, Ibama can still attach conditions to the license that mitigate a project’s impact, [but] the developer seldom fully complies with them.”

The regulations give other agencies 90 days to challenge a licensing request from the time the request is filed with Ibama. So in the case of an Amazon dam project, the Health Ministry or Funai, Brazil’s indigenous-affairs agency, would have 90 days to ascertain if the project might pose threats to local communities and to follow up, if needed, with Ibama.

Paulo Barreto of the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment says the unprecedented deadline puts agencies in a bind. “Giving Funai 90 days to contact a distant Amazon tribe about a dam project that could impact its land and rivers, and to then manifest its concerns in writing to Ibama, is very little time,” says Barreto. “This deadline puts unjust pressure on Funai.”

Simplification sought

Other regulations are meant to give retroactive environmental authorization to ports and paved roads built before 1981, when a law clarified the licensing process. Thirty-five of 40 ports and 55,000 kilometers (34,180 miles) of highways built before 1981 have not been licensed by Ibama.

Still others simplify licensing of certain types of projects, most notably of oil and gas drilling at depths of more than 1,000 meters (3,281 feet) and distances of more than 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the coast. It’s unclear whether fallout from this month’s Chevron oil spill will affect the latter measure, which was included on the theory that spills far from shore and in deep water do not pose as great a risk as near-shore spills. (See “Spill puts Brazil’s offshore oil program on the spot”—this issue.)

The new norms were unveiled two days after Brazil’s Senate approved a bill, previously passed by the lower house, defining the responsibilities of municipalities, states and Ibama with regard to environmental enforcement. The bill says cities will license projects limited to one municipality and states will license those that impact more than one. Ibama will license those whose impact could extend beyond one state or involve federally owned lands, indigenous areas, the seacoast or nuclear power.

Causing controversy is an article stating that only the environmental agency that licenses a project can suspend or revoke the license, or fine its developer. Maria Cecilia Wey de Brito of WWF Brazil and the Environment Ministry’s former secretary of biodiversity and forests, says the article “strips environmental agencies, in particular Ibama, of oversight safeguards built into Brazil’s environmental licensing. Without such safeguards, there are no checks against licensing-agency incompetency.”