Despite the growing understanding of the overwhelming impacts caused by environmental damage, there is still an underestimated perception of the importance of specialized preventive legal conduct of environmental administrative processes, especially in environmental licensing and its renewals.
When talking about overwhelming impacts, we are not limited to impacts on the environment, but also the financial and reputational impacts of the company, which suffer from difficult subsequent remediation and, at the same time, the need for repairs to the environment and social damages caused.
Not infrequently, most environmental incidents would be completely avoided if they had been previously conducted and analyzed under a specialized legal perspective and not just from a technical one, as is customary, unfortunately leaving for lawyers the analysis and remediation of the situation only when facing the incident.
When it comes to environmental demands, the path is quite different from other areas of law: the focus should be on preventive legal advisory due to the consequences that environmental damage is capable of bringing to both financial and reputational health of companies exploiting environmental resources.
In this scenario, it should be stressed that a specialized environmental law firm must utterly attend the conduct of environmental administrative processes - this being the most important moment to have legal advice - since the investment is predictable and the image of the company/enterprise remains intact.
In a global scenario with exponential demand for the intensification of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) policies and Environmental Compliance indicators, tolerance is decreasing for enterprises that cause high impacts or environmental damages, being essential to understand that the longevity of companies that ostensibly use natural resources depends on the prior and careful conduct of their environmental administrative procedures, which include specialized legal advice on the matter.
Our experience in the preventive conduction of environmental administrative processes in agroforestry, mining, infrastructure, and civil construction economic segments has pragmatically revealed the differential that mentioned specialized legal advice is able to offer, ensuring more accurate and safer solutions in order to unravel the licensing procedures for these activities.
In this way, there is no room to allow previous licensing and maintenance procedures for economic activities to be developed without the presence of lawyers specialized in environmental law, who can make all the difference in the results and longevity of the projects in the short term, medium and long term. deadlines.
Renata Ribeiro de Souza Nobre
Advogada e Coordenadora no Fonseca Brasil Advogados (Ambiental, Agrário e Minerário).
Mestre em Direito Ambiental pela Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal).