The Weak Linkage between Planning and Environmental Licensing in Brazil

Abstract

The link between spatial planning and environmental licensing has the potential to benefit the licensing process as it offers the opportunity to make things simpler and faster, besides improving public participation. Brazil adopts a range of different planning tools to different territories (i.e.: management plans for protected areas; ecologic economic zoning, for the states or regional areas; and municipal master plans, covering the complete municipal territory). However, most of the benefits of these tools` articulation with the environmental licensing have not been reached. This paper presents an overview of the ecologic economic zoning prepared in Brazil and, of the municipal master plans, bringing the discussion about if and how the environmental licensing has been mentioned in this context. For the ecological-economic zoning, the Ministry of Environment's website was consulted, regarding the available information on the situation of the EEZ in Brazil and, in relation to the municipal master plans, the reports organized by the Observatório das Metrópoles (master plans after the City Statute) and by IBGE (Profile of the Brazilian Municipalities) were also consulted. The results show that from the ecologic economic zonings already prepared, few of them have been regulated and, among these, even less has integrated the environmental licensing to their guidelines. Regarding municipal master plans, few of them refer to the environmental licensing or leave details for future regulation. The conclusion is that, although Brazil presents spatial planning tools able to work linked to environmental licensing, not only there is a flaw in the practical establishment of this relationship, but also, there are territorial gaps (areas not covered by plans), which hinders the application of these instruments in an integrated way.