Brazilian Environmental Priorities
and the
Programa Nacional de Meio Ambiente II
(Brazilian National Environmental Program II)
Roberto S. Bartholo Jr.
Production Engineering Program
Coordination of Post-Graduate Studies in Engineering – COPPE
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ
Maurício C. Delamaro
Production Department
Guaratinguetá School of Engineering
Universidade Estadual Paulista – UNESP
Prepared for presentation at the Open Meeting of the Global Environmental Change Research Community, Rio de Janeiro, October 6-8, 2001.
Abstract
A brief description of the establishment of priorities for the PNMA II (1) at the state level, highlighting the starting point of the process: the availability of a support methodology, which is succinctly discussed here. An interpretative synthesis of the process results will also be presented, and two of its aspects will be emphasized. 1. Social constraints affecting the establishment of environmental priorities and conducive to the fact that the concern with the supply of fresh water (in quantity and quality) for urban centers is considered the highest priority. We can also interpret this high incidence as an indicator of the presence of a significant issue for Brazilian public urban policy and of the decrease of investments in this sector. Thus, it is significant that this theme appears as a priority in every Region of the country considered in this study. 2. The analysis of Northeastern priorities evidences the necessity of a closer examination of the risks involving the Caatinga ecosystem 1, which today is probably the most forgotten and threatened Brazilian biome. This also points to the need for defining specific environmental policies for that area. 3. It is meaningful that the list of priorities associated with environmental problems of the Amazon Rain Forest has been very meager. This situation is analogous to the complete lack of a set of environmental priorities focused on the Pantanal biome. It is worthy of note that the Amazon, as well as the Pantanal, has received a significant amount of international resources, especially through the PPG7. (2) We wish to emphasize that the priorities of the PNMA II should not be confused with Brazilian environmental priorities. This can be explained by the amount of resources estimated for the program, as well as by the fact that they are complementary to resources from other sources. It would be a mistake to consider the designed priority framework of PNMA II as representing, without any further qualification, the "Brazilian environmental priorities". PNMA II operates under established parameters and consequently the responses at state level take these parameters into account. The typological classification of the environmental priorities of PNMA II, are constructed based on a general framework that considers: 1. The scale of the resources. Each state will have access to resources that will range from US$ 2,000,000.00 to US$ 8,000,000.00 in order to develop integrated projects. The amount of the resources will be in accordance with their qualification in PNMA II. This restriction imposes the fact that various important environmental problems remain "external" to PNMA II. This is because in large interventions, the available resources would mean but a drop in the ocean. The amount of available resources seems insufficient to produce significant effects towards the solution or mitigation of the problem being confronted, or even of the potentiality intended to be explored. 2. Complementation of resources. The advent of PNMA II happens within a complex framework, where actions and initiatives concerning environmental problems are already underway. States may either choose to aggregate their resources with those from other sources, already committed to current actions or, alternatively, to prioritize their direction towards domains of environmental priorities not accounted for and lacking investments. (1) PNMA II-National Program for the Environment-Phase II (2) PPG7-Program for the Protection of the Brazilian Rain Forest.
1. Introduction
The Program National do Meio Ambiente (Brazilian National Environmental Program) – PNMA II – is targeted at the improvement of environmental management of the country at federal, state and municipal levels and at the expansion of the possibilities for the participation of civil society in environmental management. Its final objective is the improvement of the quality of life of the population.
PNMA II is the object of a loan agreement between the Brazilian government and the World Bank, and is structured in two components: a) Institutional Development, with three subcomponents: – Environmental Licensing, Water Quality Monitoring and Coastal management; and b) Integrated Environmental Asset Management.
Planned to be implemented under the coordination of the Ministry of the Environment – MMA – program’s execution strategy is divided into three phases, the execution of which will require an estimated period of 10 years. The first phase, with a 3-year time horizon, began with the identification and prioritization of environmental problems in each state of the Federation, the results of which are, now in 2001, subsidizing the formulation of projects for the Integrated Environmental Asset Management component.
The Integrated Environmental Asset Management component is aimed at encouraging the adoption of sustainable practices and integrated management of the country’s environmental resources.
Environmental assets are defined as natural resources which offer important services to human communities (for example, for purposes of production and consumption), and which require adequate management for the improvement or maintenance of their quality.
State-level participation in the Environmental Asset Management component is linked to a qualification process. This process involves establishing state environmental priorities and compliance with eligibility criteria.
In accordance with the methodology framework established by the MMA, the establishment of environmental priorities aims at providing incentives for environmental planning, optimization of the use of financial resources, supporting the decision-making process and, above all, assuring that actions to be developed are sustainable and, in future, internalized by local social agencies and political spheres.
This paper presents a summary of the development of the state-level environmental priority formulation process undertaken within the sphere of PNMA II during the year 2000.
The process has as its starting point a support methodology made available by the MMA to its agencies to the different states, said methodology being focused both on the formulation of such priorities and the establishment of parameters for their evaluation. The process has developed in a cooperative manner, supported by a continuing dialogue between the technical staff of the MMA and the relevant agencies of each state. This methodology is described herein, both in terms of its fundamental approaches and its conditions of applicability in respects to PNMA II.
2. The methodology utilized
The major objective of the methodology developed to assist in the process of formulation and ranking of state-level environmental priorities is to serve as an effective instrument for actors situated in extremely diverse institutional contexts. There are cases in which the process is conducted by a great plurality of actors and state government departments acting in a coordinated manner; there are cases in which the conduction is the responsibility of a single institutional actor; and there are further cases in which an undeniable institutional fragility prevails, and others in which a significant effort towards institutional reinforcement exists. There are also cases in which it is possible to determine the presence of a complex, technically and operationally qualified and reasonably consolidated superstructure.
Thus, one of the methodology’s positive attributes is its flexibility, that is to say, its capacity to adapt to contextual diversity and to incorporate new elements, such as the instrumental developments born of its application. This flexibility has been proven in various situations during the process. This is due to its being an open framework, capable of being situationally reconfigured. Its descriptors act as qualitative indicators serving the establishment of the most convenient scale of comparison for each case. And each state cam find space to introduce the adaptations it finds most suitable without violating the methodological strictures.
In this sense, the methodology emphasizes the importance of the democratic-participative validation, aiming at facilitating the development of a broader consensus and as incentive so as not to restrict the definition of each state’s environmental priorities to a discussion within a small group of technicians. Thus, there is a concern with verifying if the practices of each state go beyond the mechanisms of traditional representative democracy, to find root in the field of participative democracy, implying not only the search for existing instances of democratic consultation and validation, but also their effective action in the decision-making process in question.
The methodology attempts to provoke analysis of these issues on the part of local agencies, giving them due consideration prior to the defining and ranking of environmental priorities. To this end, its has sought to verify a set of framing parameters for all and any priorities intended to be established. These parameters pertain to:
i. The possibility of the priority in question being fitted to the scope of PNMA II;
ii. The internal logic of the argument that supports the confirmation of that priority as such;
iii. The conditions of such arguments being shared by others which are not agencies stating such priority;
iv. The weaving of the environmental priority into human and social factors;
v. The complementarity of resources and partnerships.
These parameters have been “translated”, from an operational viewpoint, into a set of descriptors, which have been presented as permitting comparison among alternative statements. The descriptors are as follows:
i. Framing descriptors (to verify whether the priority presented is capable of being framed within the scope of the Environmental Asset Management Program, i.e., it should not be configured as an emergency necessity, must have scale and territoriality compatible with resources available and a multiplier effect capable of leveraging resources and partnerships, among other requirements).
ii. Consistency descriptors (verify three aspects: a) existence of explicit environmental priorities in other political-institutional documents external to the OEMA in question (with emphasis on the plan of government) and corroborate the priority presented by these other documents; b) effective budgetary commitment with funding of actions for meeting the priority in question (on the part of government, special programs, private enterprise, etc.), c) continuity over time of actions undertaken for purposes of meeting the priority in question).
iii. Convergence descriptors (compares the priority presented by a local OEMA/agent with other priorizations made explicit by other situationally involved agencies, to demonstrate the profile of such agencies (other state, municipal, federal government, and/or non-governmental instances), and the qualification of their intensity will always depend on the combination of their forms).
iv. Participative-democratic validation descriptors (verifies whether the formulation process for the priorities presented by the OEMA is in keeping with participative democratic practices, ascertaining whether or not the existing democratic consultation and validation instances are effectively active in the decision-making process in question).
v. Impact on IDH descriptors (verify whether the environmental priority in question causes relevant social impact relative to the three dimensions which are part of the state IDH (life expectancy, education and income level), where an important consideration is the demographic density of the territories affected by the initiative in question. This is a criterion of distinction, and not of exclusion).
3. Results: priority thematics and biomes
The analysis of the priorities presented by the various states, under the prism of their thematics, explicates the picture of which new environmental assets and biomes have become privileged objects of concern and intervention under PNMA II.
We have considered a universe of 46 priorities indicated by the states. Of these, MA has established one priority, SE has established 3, AM, PA, RO and MS have established zero and all others 2. The aggregation permitted the characterization of 6 major themes:
i. Guarantee of availability of water for supplying urban centers in areas of significant demographic concentration and discipline usage conflicts;
ii. Recuperation and conservation of bodies of water and of soil degraded by activities involved in the raising of pigs, industry and urban waste;
iii. Combating soil degradation processes caused by erosion and desertification;
iv. Conservation and sustainable use of vegetation and biodiversity aiming at reducing loss and adding value;
v. Encouragement of sustainable tourism for the exploration of ecotourism potentials and discipline of predatory practices;
vi. Encouragement of sustainable fishing and exploration of economic potentials and discipline of conflicts of use.
The characterization of 6 major themes in their spatial distribution over Brazilian territory will permit us to better visualize the impact expected from PNMA II for purposes of analysis, especially if we consider, as follows, not only the distribution of priorities among the political divisions of the Federation, but also their incidence over the various biomes (Coastal Formations, Amazon Rain Forest, Caatinga, Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, Southern Grasslands and the Pantanal).1
The following diagrams permit us to better visualize the aggregations effected and their proportional participation in the PNMA II priorities and in their spatial distribution over Brazilian territory, by state.
The priority themes of PNMA II in the Brazilian general scenario are summarized in the diagram below:
An initial observation worthy of note is the incidence of indications relative to the assurance of quality and quantity of the water supply for urban centers. This has emerged as a priority theme of PNMA II on a national level, with 53% of the priority indications. We can interpret such a high incidence as indicating the presence of a major issue for Brazilian public policy and appears in all regions, as shown in Diagram 2.
Also significant is that the problem of water supply for urban centers shows a greater incidence in the Northeast (53% of the indications) and Southeast (20%). Also noteworthy is the fact of the theme being considered a priority relative to the largest metropolitan areas in Brazil: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. The strong presence of a theme of such obvious social dimension within the scope of environmental priorities indicated by the various states of the Brazilian Federation for PNMA II, seems to veto any pretension of equating the environment with an externality relative to society.