Rural Environmental Registry has 2% of analyzes completed – 04/13/2023 – Environment

A central tool for the environmental regularization of rural properties in the country, the CAR (Rural Environmental Registry) is still in its infancy in its implementation, while it is undergoing attempts at deregulation, the so-called “boiadas”.

Only 12% of registrations began to undergo analysis by state governments and only 2% had analyzes completed across the country. The data are from the study “Where we are in the implementation of the Forestry Code – Radiography of the CAR and the PRA in the Brazilian states”, published this Thursday (13th) by the Climate Policy Initiative, an institution affiliated with PUC-Rio.

“If we maintain this pace of implementation, the Forest Code runs the risk of losing credibility and becoming a law on paper”, states the report, which is updated annually.

The slowness in processing registrations prevents the next step: joining the PRA (Environmental Regularization Program). At this stage, based on the information provided by the CAR, the owner adheres to a commitment to recompose irregularly deforested areas on the property, such as legal reserve portions or permanent preservation areas.

Congress wants to extend the deadline for joining the PRA. At the end of March, the Chamber approved MP (provisional measure) 1,150/2022, which gives one year for the owner to adhere to the regularization after calling the environmental agency. The period established by the Forestry Code is 180 days. The MP also makes other changes, also proposing relaxations in the Atlantic Forest Law. The text will still go through the Senate.

Only seven states completed the PRA implementation process: Acre, Rondônia, Pará, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Bahia and Minas Gerais.

However, the adherence of the owners is still low. The state of Rondônia has already analyzed and found environmental liabilities in 5,999, but only 170 of them became terms of environmental commitments signed by the owners.

In Mato Grosso, of the 4,610 records with environmental liabilities, only 716 adhered to regularization. The discrepancy is smaller in Acre, where 372 terms were signed, out of a total of 875 registrations with pending environmental issues.

“Difficulties range from producers’ resistance to committing themselves to environmental regularization to lack of knowledge of productive or multifunctional forest restoration solutions”, assesses the report.

Minas Gerais management has created a shortcut for landowners who want to take a step forward in environmental regularization: they can self-declare a commitment to regularization even before the CAR is analyzed.

The self-declared PRA, as it is called in the study, would still be further evaluated by the government. In the last year, the state signed ten terms of commitments with rural landowners.

Another strategy is tried by Mato Grosso, which conditioned the conclusion of the CAR analysis to adherence to the PRA. By joining the steps, the rural owner is encouraged to adhere to the environmental regularization in order to stay up to date with the registration.

Amid the new strategies experimented by the states, the study also warns of new “herds” in state regulation.

Last year, the state of Goiás approved a more flexible law than the Forestry Code, which provided amnesty for illegal deforestation that took place before 2008. State law 21,231/2022 extends this deadline for deforestation that occurred until 2019.

Questioned whether the measure would be illegal, the environmental secretariat of the government of Goiás denied that the state law opposes or makes the Forest Code more flexible.

In a note, the agency stated to the report that the law creates new mechanisms for compensation, forestry and for damages, and that “the timeframes set out there relate to these two compensations, in no way affecting the legal regime of the CAR, which is given by the Forestry Code”.

The note also argues that the deforester can compensate for the suppressed area by protecting an area of ​​native vegetation. “The recovery of the native vegetation of the cerrado, especially areas of grassland and savannas, is difficult to carry out, with a low success rate”, he says.

For Cristina Lopes, research manager at the Climate Policy Initiative and co-author of the study, the Goiás law “is an aberration”. “Flagrantly illegal in relation to the Forest Code and so far no action has been proposed in the state on the constitutionality of this legislation”, she says.

“This also sets a precedent for other states to make this change or for Congress itself to see an opportunity to do this at the federal level. It is a serious setback and brings more legal uncertainty to the state itself”, he completes.

Another pressure that generates more uncertainty about the implementation of the policy comes from agribusiness representatives, who would like to see the Brazilian Forestry Service in the Ministry of Agriculture, where it was in the Bolsonaro administration.

The determination that the body would return to the Ministry of the Environment was one of the first measures published by the Lula government, still in early January. According to the study by the Climate Policy Initiative, the conversion into law of MP 1,154/2023, which establishes the organization of federal government bodies, would bring security to the command of the body, in the face of pressure from the sector.

The Brazilian Forest Service is responsible for supporting the states with technological tools, such as streamlined analysis, carried out by computer, based on georeferencing.

Today only two states use the technology to evaluate rural property registrations: São Paulo and Amapá. The customization difficulties for use in the rest of the country frustrate the expectation of state agencies that the technology would leverage the process.

“We are looking to improve the new modules of our system, but we are also looking for the states that have their systems to learn from them what is working best”, he told the Sheet the director of the Brazilian Forestry Service, Garo Batmanian.

The report also points out that the CAR system should prevent registration of rural properties overlapping protected areas, such as conservation units and indigenous lands.

“It is observed that cancellation efforts [dos cadastros] are being annulled by the registration of new registrations, so it is essential that governments adopt measures to prevent these registrations”, states the report.

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