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Brazil Passes ‘Devastation Bill’ that Drastically Weakens Environmental Law [1]
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Date: 2025-07
Brazilian lawmakers have passed a bill that drastically weakens the country’s environmental safeguards and is seen by many activists as the most significant setback for the country’s environmental legislation in the past 40 years. The law also effectively restricts the rights of indigenous communities over their ancestral lands.
The new law — widely referred to as the “devastation bill” and already approved by the senate in May — passed in congress in the early hours of Thursday by 267 votes to 116, despite opposition from more than 350 organizations and social movements. It now goes to the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has 15 working days to either approve or veto it.
“Either way, its approval is a tragedy,” said Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory civil society group, arguing that the legislation would, among other serious consequences, drive large-scale deforestation and heighten the risk of human-caused climate disasters.
“There’s no precedent for how damaging this law is,” she said, describing it, as have several other environmental organizations, as “the greatest setback to Brazil’s environmental legislation” since the 1980s, when licensing first became a legal requirement in the country.
The law also states that agencies responsible for protecting the rights of Indigenous and quilombola communities will only have a say in licensing processes for projects located on officially recognized territories — excluding more than 30 percent of Indigenous lands and over 80 percent of quilombola areas that have been awaiting official titling for years. If the law does come into force, it is likely to trigger a wave of legal challenges, as activists and legal experts argue that it violates the constitution and previous rulings by the supreme court.
Read more here.
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[1] Url:
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