ENVIRONMENTAL regulations in Brazil have been weakened by a new law, which was nicknamed the “Devastation Bill”, passed months before the country hosts the UN’s COP30 environment summit.
The Brazilian Climate Minister, Marina Silva, said that the Bill “totally ignored that we are in a climate emergency” and “ignored those who suffer”, and called it “an attack on the future”.
In a social-media post after its approval by the Brazilian National Congress, Ms Silva said that it “fatally wounds one of the country’s main instruments of environmental protection”.
It was passed last week after the intense lobbying of agribusiness, which criticised the environmental permit system as a barrier to development. The new legislation allows projects with “medium” polluting potential — such as dam-building and some agricultural activities — to obtain an environmental licence simply by the filling in of an online form.
An Evangelical Christian, Ms Silva has been attacked by the Christian Right, which in Brazil is aligned with conservative opponents of measures for environmental protection and indigenous rights.
After the Bill passed the initial Senate stage in May, Ms Silva was summoned to appear before a hearing on oil exploration and was told by other Christian senators to “know her place”. She walked out of the session in protest.
After further attacks on her in Congress earlier this month, she said: “They ask me how I can keep calm listening to so much nonsense and aggression. This is my response: I pray to God who hears and answers me.”
A black woman from the bottom of the social ladder — her family were rubber-tappers — she said that the attacks on her were rooted in racism and in “machismo”. A member of the Assembly of God Pentecostal Church since the age of 40, she was raised as a Roman Catholic. She learned to read and write only at the age of 16 in a convent school, learnt about liberation theology, and considered becoming a nun.
She stood for the presidency twice, but lost the backing of Evangelicals after refusing to endorse conservative causes. She supported Left-leaning Lula da Silva for President. Despite his victory in 2022 over the right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, the current Congress is heavily conservative in its composition.
The climate campaign Nossas told the Religion News Service that many church leaders in Brazil resisted preaching about climate change.
The human-rights activist Lucas Louback said: “A large portion of the Evangelical community has not embraced a theology of creation or care for the environment,” but adopted an apocalyptic viewpoint in which “there’s no need to care for the environment, the sky, the land, forests, rivers or the oceans.”
The Bill now rests with President Lula, who could approve or veto it. But if he does so, the conservative Congress members are likely to overturn it, meaning that it could go to the Supreme Court. Failing to veto the Bill is also likely to result in some form of legal action.
Brazil is to host the COP20 climate summit in November. Environmental activists warn that the Act is, therefore, an embarrassment.