Licenciamento Ambiental Municipal em Minas Gerais : uma análise da região sul do Estado

Abstract

Environmental licensing is increasingly decentralized to Brazilian municipalities, especially after the publication of Complementary Law (LC) 140/2011, which defined the competencies between federated entities in terms of environmental protection and made municipalities responsible for licensing activities whose environmental impact is of a local nature. It is worth mentioning that the Law above sets standards in items III, VI, and VII of the head provision and sole paragraph of article 23 of the Federal Constitution for the cooperation between the Union, the States, the Federal District, and the Municipalities in administrative actions arising from the exercise of common competence regarding the protection of remarkable natural landscapes, the environmental protection, the fight against pollution in any of its forms, and the preservation of forests, fauna, and flora. Specifically, in Minas Gerais, the definition of local impact had not yet been established. Under the terms of article 9 of LC 140/2011, local impact represents an obstacle to the assumption, by municipal federative entities, of the competence to carry out the environmental licensing. In this sense, COPAM Normative Deliberation nº 213 of February 22nd, 2017, edited by the State of Minas Gerais as the newest instrument of federative cooperation in the environmental aspect, regulates the provisions of article 9, item XIV, subitem “a” and article 18, paragraph 2 of the Federal LC nº 140 of December 8th, 2011, to define the local impact in the State and establish the typologies of enterprises and activities whose environmental licensing will be the attribution of the Municipalities. This research aimed at conceptualizing the history of environmental public policies in Brazil, environmental licensing, its history, and how the procedure is conducted in the State. Another objective was to characterize the licensing path until its decentralization to the municipalities, passing through cooperation between federative entities, through the federative environmental pact, until a complete approach to DN 213/17. The general objective was to establish the motivations for adhering or not to the municipal environmental licensing by the municipalities of Southern Minas Gerais (chosen as the object of the research) and the challenges of the municipalities facing municipal licensing to understand why the most important municipalities in the region have not yet assumed the original competence of environmental regularization and compare the municipal and State licensing in Minas Gerais.