Waterway Panorama - Antaq

Revision of CONAMA Resolution 344/04
The first licensing rules that enable or guarantee
the quality of production environments
are under review. Of these, the best
known regulation is CONAMA Resolution
344/04. The Brazilian environmental clearance
progress lacks environmental management regulations,
unlike licensing rules, which could be
simplified, without losing their potential to ensure
environmental quality.
As for environmental management, there are
not many rules. The regulatory process of environmental
management, necessarily beginning
with licensing to establish the focus of management,
needs to be expanded. It may comprise
compulsory rules, which mostly follow the
line of manuals or similar procedures. We have
this culture and, unfortunately, do not follow
other countries.
The CONAMA Resolution 344, in turn, has
that opportunity. It could constitute a new model
of environmental regulation, in a comprehensive
document, with a good mastery of the principles
that govern environmental laws, good
range of content, aggregation of state-of-the-art
technology in dealing with environmental protection,
and proper understanding. These are
the attributes of environmental management
instruments.
In the revision of environmental regulations,
this has been the proposal of ANTAQ and other
stakeholders of port activities. This means moving
forward on environmental regulation, so
that we may implement management tools that
environmental agencies and production agents
need. In the current design of our system of environmental
qualification, this task would be attributed
to CONAMA, which, however, has been
shy in promoting the advancement of environmental
technology.
To remedy this lack of environmental governance,
ANTAQ, alongside the Ministry of Environment
(MMA), is developing instructions in the
form of manuals or handbooks that make it
easier for port agents to protect the environment.
This work is in the context of the Port Environmental
Agenda, nationally. The Local Environmental
Agenda differs by the presence of environmental
regulation locations and (public
and private) regulated agents.
In this case, it is important that the manuals
are sufficiently indicative regarding the stakeholders’
action to achieve the desired end result;
a healthy environment in terms of occupational
safety and health; and valuation of natural resources
existing in this environment.
The elaboration of the new document, replacing
CONAMA Resolution 344, will induce
the formation of an environmental database.
This database should already be available to
private agents, but it is not due to the lack of focus
on the environmental issue of licensing
agencies. This database, addressed by Law
10,650/03, would be developed by federal and
local environmental agencies as a result of the
licensing, as they excel in this area and have a
responsibility within the system of environmental
regulation created by Law 6,938/81.
This type of information among the most important
environmental principles, as it requires
us to perform the scientific and technical development,
present in nearly all the environmental
regulation, particularly in CONAMA 344, i.e.,
the relationship between agents and impact
produced by them.
In the original version of CONAMA 344, due
to the lack of these environmental data, the
resolution had to be restricted to assessing the
quality of sediments. Today, it has no support, as
it is possible to have a resolution of the environmental
management of these services in the
ports, adding the knowledge acquired on environmental
dredging. This is a limitation of the
current Resolution that needs to be corrected.
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