Tortoises in trees: will Lula stand up for the Atlantic Forest?

After Congress delayed the start of legislative work in 2023, Brazil’s parliament has yet to address some pressing issues left behind by the former Jair Bolsonaro administration. 

A prime example is the former president’s remaining provisional decrees — executive orders that take immediate effect as laws, but must be approved by Congress before becoming permanent. And one such decree, if approved, would pose a massive threat to Brazil’s Atlantic Forest — and test the environmental credentials of the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva government.

The lower house last week approved Provisional Decree 1150/2022, which contains a series of scandalous rider provisions that would leave the already depleted Atlantic Forest vulnerable to all manner of deforestation threats. 

Issued by the president’s office on Boxing Day last year — four days before Mr. Bolsonaro flew to the U.S. to spend the final days of his term in another hemisphere — the measure originally concerned the so-called Rural Environmental Register (CAR), an online system designed to collect data from all of Brazil’s rural properties and clearly instruct landowners on the steps they must take to comply with environmental regulations.

The CAR was introduced in the much-maligned 2012 update of Brazil’s Forest Code, as a counterweight to a highly controversial amnesty for approximately 29 million hectares of land illegally deforested before 2008.

But rural property owners faced delays of more than two years just to sign up to the CAR. This Bolsonaro-era decree extended the registration deadline for the sixth time since its creation.

The more pressing problem with the provisional decree, however, is a series of rider provisions that have nothing to do with the CAR and make direct changes to the law governing the protection of the Atlantic Forest.

Putting tortoises in trees

In Brazil, wildly unrelated riders inserted into bills are known...