03 - CERPCH - Unifei

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATORY MARK
OPINION
Economic wealth and planet improvement are sides of the same coin, where human life is its greatest treasure.
Environmental Regulatory Mark is a set of rules and laws aiming
at the preservation, improvement and recuperation of the environmental
quality propitious to life so as to ensure conditions towards
socio-economic development, national security interests
and protection of the dignity of human life in Brazil.
The regulation is carried out by the National Congress, by the
Executive Power and by the members of SISNAMA – National System
for the Environment, which defends the interests of the environment,
the citizens, the government and the companies that
were granted the right to explore an environmental asset (a water
potential, for example).
At a federal level, in December 2009, there were 644 environmental
rules divided into: 114 laws, 156 decrees, 169 resolutions,
81 ordinances, 45 normative instructions, and 78 rules for the electric
sector.
In Brazil, it is estimated the validity of approximately 16,000
rules for environmental issues and 3.7 million diverse rules over
the past 20 years (which corresponds to 5.5 kilometers of rules
should they be printed on A4 paper using Arial 12 font), resulting in
the edition of 774 rules a business day. This evolution is inversely
proportional to the capacity of the public power to implement
them.
The regulatory mark should be responsible for the creation of
an ambient that could conciliate the company's economic and financial
health, creating and capturing value with the demands and
expectations of preservation, improvement and recuperation of
the environmental quality.
Translation Adriana Candal
However, environmental demands are increasingly complex
and expensive. The environmental legislation deals with diffuse
rights, one the environment belongs to everybody and no one in
particular, presenting: meta(trans)individuality, intrinsic conflicts,
temporal and special mutability. The licensing and granting acts
are precarious. The current environmental legislation does not
guarantee anything in order to guarantee absolutely everything.
The reduced efficiency of the environmental licensing system
(seen as slow, bureaucratic and “cartorial”, expressing the nonpriority
given to the environmental organs), transfers to the entrepreneur
the responsibility of issues that should be in charge of the
Public Power to create a regional harmony (conflicts between public
policies and the interests regarding the protection of the environment).
The main demand is not for new legal instruments or for the
flexibility of those that already exist. The priority is to advance the
consolidation regarding the understanding of the so-called undetermined
juridical concepts: significant environmental impacts, relevant
interests, etc. – and improve the information that guides the
decision making processes about the environmental feasibility of
the enterprises. This debate requires the direct involvement of the
scientific community, as well as technical and legal segments that
participate in the environmental management in Brazil.
Equally, we also need: i) transparence and an optimum quality
in all of the stages of the environmental licensing process; ii)
strengthening of the environmental agencies; iii) homogenization
of the procedures - predictability (bound deadline and costs); iv)
elimination of the competence conflicts, regulating the article 23rd
of the Federal Constitution (common competence between the federal
state and city governments regarding environmental protection);
v) granting the environmental license with the existence of legal
conditions so that the enterprise can be carried on; vi) changing
the environmental crime legislation public server that deals with environmental
permissions or authorizations will only be punished if
there is deceit; vii) regulation of article 231 of the Federal Constitution
about the use of water resources, including hydropower potentials
in native Brazilian land; viii) equating of the pre-existing environmental
assets, such as the program “Citizenship Territory”, in regions
that will receive new SHP investments in order to solve public
investment deficits that are not imputable to the enterprises.
The one who gains with a stable clear and well-conceived regulatory
mark is the user of essential services (doomed to live with
the lack of services because of the lack of investments and all the
difficulties that come from this deficiency) and stimulate the trust
of the investors by knowing which laws protect them. They need to
be sure that they are immune to the mood of the future governors.
Economic wealth (the richest societies are exactly the ones
which can apply resources to environmental preservation) and
planet improvement (with sustainable products and processes) are
sides of the same coin, where the human life is the greatest treasure.
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