Conama: environment council must change composition – 05/18/2023 – Environment

Members of Conama (National Council for the Environment), sworn in this Wednesday (17), approved at the first meeting under the Lula (PT) government the creation of groups to study changes in the body’s composition and regiment.

The so-called advisory groups were created based on civil society’s demand for parity and diversity of representatives. The first meeting had an atmosphere of conciliation and the resumption of the activities of the council, weakened under the management of former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL).

Also, the council approved an urgent request to revoke a rule by the Bolsonaro government that made it difficult to register civil society entities. The theme should be voted on at the next meeting, in August.

The changes were signaled by the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, at the opening of the meeting.

“There is a demand from society for there to be parity among directors, and it has already been established that this will be the work of the council itself, in its technical chambers.”

Currently, the council is made up of 44 representatives from the federal government, 27 from states and the Federal District, 8 from municipalities, 22 from workers’ and civil society organizations, 8 from business organizations and 4 invited guests, divided between the Federal and State Public Prosecutor’s Offices, the Chamber and Senate.

In addition to the minister, who presides over the council, ministers Alexandre Padilha, from Institutional Relations, Jorge Messias, from the Attorney General’s Office, Márcio Costa Macêdo, from the general secretary of the Presidency, and other authorities, such as the president from Ibama, where the meeting took place, Rodrigo Agostinho. There were also guests, such as the Minister of the Supreme Court of Justice Herman Benjamin.

Created in 1981, Conama is an advisory body with deliberative power. One of its functions, for example, is to create rules and control standards for environmental pollution. The activity is unpaid, and representatives of the government, the productive sectors and civil society form the council.

The composition of the body was dehydrated in the Bolsonaro administration, which reduced the number of members with voting rights from 96 to 23 and reduced the participation of civil society.

Lula’s decree in February increased the membership to 114 members and created the hitherto unprecedented technical chamber dedicated to climate change issues.

In the first stage of the meeting this Wednesday, Marina Silva said that the actions of the environmental portfolio will have, in addition to articulation with other ministries, gradual economic incentives.

“It is possible to be the country of family farming, but to have agribusiness that is low carbon agriculture. We will probably have, on the 15th, according to the minister [Carlos Fávaro, da Agricultura e Pecuária]the new Safra Plan, with more than R$ 300 billion, so that it is all low carbon.”

According to the minister, the idea is for the productive sector to adopt gradual measures. “It’s a low-carbon agenda. It starts at the baseline scale, with CAR (Rural Environmental Registry). Then it moves towards traceability, towards certification. When it reaches a certain level, interest rates may reduce”, she said.

For lawyer Rubens Born, one of the representatives, there is consensus among the members regarding the need to make Conama more active.

“It is a democratic resumption after a period of four years of dismantling instances of social participation. Conama has constitutional foundations. Politically, the government’s commitment to resuming this work was already signaled,” said he, who is a representative of the Brazilian Forum of NGOs and Social Movements for the Environment and Development.

For Rafael Giovanelli, specialist in public policies at WWF-Brasil, Conama, with the changes proposed by civil society, should become “more responsive and efficient, with better procedures for protecting the environment”.

“We concluded the day with the composition of the technical chambers, of the advisory groups that will evaluate the composition and the regiment”, he explained.

There are still two meetings scheduled by the board for 2023, scheduled for August and November.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}