Amazon, economic frontiers and the sustainability of the environmental licensing process in large projects

Abstract

The article discusses some of the recent hydroelectric projects and mining industry forecasting in, proposed and in progress in the Brazilian Amazon and presents problems regarding environmental licensing processes and conceptual inadequacies that compromise the characterization of hydroelectric conversion as sustainable technical activity. The article also supports the analysis of governmental plans of expanding the supply of electricity in order to produce an overview about the internal distribution of the energy generated and how it is shared among industrial sectors. It also brings expressive numbers of mineral extraction expansion and the resulting embodied energy export in mineral commodities, in order to characterize the directions of economic benefits and the environmental costs that remain in those places of origin. Through the selection of some real cases in the licensing process, serious problems were identified since those have not been properly examined either under the environmental studies required for the licensing, or in the political decision-making process. The superposition or proximity between protected areas and areas affected by projects and cumulative effects, such as deforestation and sectioning of multiple paths from a same river also raised as important issues to be more deeply debated in the so called sustainable projects.