Despite claims of environmental leadership and promises to preserve the Amazon rainforest ahead of COP30, Brazil is stripping away protections for the region’s vital ecosystems faster than workers dismantled the tents that housed the recent global climate summit in Belém.
On Nov. 27, less than a week after COP30 ended, a powerful political bloc in Brazil’s National Congress, representing agribusiness, and development interests, weakened safeguards for the Amazon’s rivers, forests, and Indigenous communities.
The rollback centered on provisions in an environmental licensing bill passed by the government a few months before COP30. The law began to take shape well before, during the Jair Bolsonaro presidency from 2019 to 2023. It reflected the deregulatory agenda of the rural caucus, the Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária, which wielded significant power during his term and remains influential today.
Bolsonaro’s government openly supported weakening environmental licensing. His environment minister, Ricardo Salles, dismissed licensing as “a barrier to development” and pushed for broad deregulation.
Current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vetoed many of its most controversial provisions in August, citing risks to Indigenous rights and environmental oversight. But in late November, the legislature overturned those vetoes and reinstated the contested sections.
“This is neither improving nor modernizing, it is simply deregulation,” said Sarah Sax, who analyzes Brazil’s climate and human rights policies as a researcher with Climate Rights International, a California-based nonprofit advocating for climate justice.
“It’s happening in Brazil in ways that mirror what you’re seeing around the world. These are proxy fights over democracy, human rights, and institutional power,” she said, noting a broader global pattern of industrial and political blocs pushing deregulation and weakening institutions designed to protect communities and ecosystems.
According to analyses by the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and other organizations, the provisions at issue will enable many projects to get permits by self-declaring compliance, without undergoing complete environmental impact assessments or third-party review.