MUNICIPAL ENVIRONMENTAL LICENSING: THE CASE OF UBERABA, MINAS GERAIS STATE, BRAZIL

Abstract

National Environmental Policy is the main environmental legislation in Brazil, which establishes instruments to achieve its objectives. The most applied instrument is Environmental Licensing. Associated with it, is the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Federal, state and municipal level have competence to license various types of enterprises, according to the Complementary Law n° 140/2011. Although scenario is changing, most Brazilian cities do not have a licensing system: they lack legislation, lack specific bodies, as well as skilled labor to carry out such activity. Existing challenges indicate the need to investigate the suitability of municipal environmental agencies, their institutional capacity and existence of specific legislation in order to improve local Environmental Licensing. In view of this, this article had as objective to verify the procedural effectiveness of decentralized Environmental Licensing, focusing the study in the city of Uberaba, Minas Gerais State, Brazil. This was done by surveying and analyzing Environmental Licensing documents and processes, conducting
interviews, reviewing literature and legislation, along with choosing appropriate criteria to evaluate local licensing system (considering legislation, administrative framework, EIA procedure, actors involved and availability of resources), besides the verification of its effectiveness. According to the results obtained, it can be said that Uberaba presents evidence of an Environmental Licensing system that is effective from
procedural point of view because it has met most of the applied criteria. This refers to the importance of studies of this nature in order to evaluate the effectiveness of licensing systems, so that their weaknesses are identified for the proposition of
improvements.