• The government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has launched renewal works for the BR-319 highway, using a new legal loophole to bypass environmental licensing requirements.
• The road cuts through the heart of the Brazilian Amazon; paving it, according to scientists, would push the rainforest closer to tipping point.
• ​The announcement was followed by the resignation of top environmental officials from the administration.
• Observers suggest the move by Lula, who came to office on a pro-environmental platform, is a bid to rally regional voters ahead of this year’s elections.

See All Key Ideas

Heavy machinery will soon be working on the road that may determine the future of the Amazon Rainforest: On April 13, the Brazilian government issued calls for four bids to pave the controversial BR-319 highway.

Inaugurated in 1976 to connect two major Amazonian municipalities, Manaus and Porto Velho, the BR-319 runs 885 kilometers (550 miles) and crosses one of the best-preserved areas of the Brazilian Amazon, home to 69 Indigenous territories and 41 conservation units. The middle section of the highway was never fully paved, and after decades of abandonment, it became undrivable, especially during the rainy season.

Paving this 339-km (211-mi) critical stretch has long been advocated by locals, politicians and businesspeople, who currently rely on plane or boat to travel. Paving the road to improve connectivity, however, would come at a high environmental cost.

Scientists say upgrading BR-319 may push the rainforest to a tipping point, transforming it into a much drier, less biodiverse ecosystem. However, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who came to office on a pro-environmental platform, is exploiting an environmental licensing loophole to announce it will start roadworks in the second half of this year. It has budgeted 1.3 billion reais ($260 million) for the project.

“The idea is to get started quickly, with independent mobilizations, taking advantage of the Amazonian summer and making as much progress as possible,” Fabrício Galvão, general director of the National Department of Transportation Infrastructure (DNIT), said at the project announcement.

In October, Lula will run for reelection, hoping to secure his fourth term. The president supports the project, despite his commitment to end Amazonian deforestation by 2030.

When Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, took office in 2019, his antienvironmental agenda and support for fully paving BR-319 triggered a rush of land grabbers, ranchers and illegal loggers into the area, in turn prompting a 140% increase in deforestation. According to a study by researchers at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), paving the middle section would spark the opening of multiple secondary roads branching off the main stem, with deforestation rates increasing fourfold by 2050. This process has already started, with a report identifying 26 illegal access points at various locations along the highway.

“All studies point to a massive impact on deforestation in the Amazon, opening up a new, violent frontier,” said Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of nonprofits advocating for climate action. The organization says it will challenge the project in court.

Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions would also increase fourfold as a result of the project, according to UFMG researchers, preventing the country from meeting its emissions reduction goals under the Paris Agreement. According to a paper published in early April in Science, the road could also become the birthplace of a new pandemic, by disrupting “one of the world’s largest zoonotic reservoirs.”

Until now, the road’s renewal had been blocked by the federal environmental agency, IBAMA, which demanded detailed studies and preventive measures before issuing a definitive environmental license; a prior approval was granted by the agency under Bolsonaro, which is being contested in court.

Last year, however, Congress created the perfect loophole for the project by loosening environmental licensing requirements. The new law, deemed by environmentalists as Brazil’s largest environmental setback of the last four decades, exempts from environmental licensing “services and construction projects aimed at maintaining and improving infrastructure at existing facilities.” This provision was vetoed by President Lula himself, but the veto was ultimately overturned by Congress.

Cloves Benevides, the undersecretary for sustainability at the Ministry of Transportation, didn’t specifically mention the new legislation when he said that a “change in interpretation has made it possible to classify these projects as improvements” and speed up the paving work.

Lula visits a village of the Munduruku people, in the town of Manaquiri, Amazonas state, in September 2024. During the visit, Lula expressed his support for the rebuilding of BR-319. Image courtesy of Ricardo Stuckert.

Gabriela Nepomuceno, public policy specialist at Greenpeace Brazil, said this indicates that not only will the paving go ahead, but that it will do so without the proper environmental studies. “Environmental permitting is not merely an administrative process,” she said. “It involves a series of technical analyses related to the precautionary principle, safeguards, and the conditions that companies must meet to minimize the impact of the project.”

In an email to Mongabay, the DNIT said that “the standard licensing process will continue,” but didn’t give any details.

Astrini said the government can’t simply abandon the ongoing environmental licensing process. “I don’t know what the government’s strategy will be on this, but its election strategy is quite clear,” he said. “The Lula administration wants to use this project to rally votes in the region.”

In 2025, the Lula administration studied a “parkway” model for the BR-319 to prevent land invasions and protect wildlife. It would include 4-meter-high (13-foot) fences to isolate the road, electronic monitoring, and 170 wildlife crossings in the form of tunnels. IBAMA and the Federal Police would have fixed posts along the road, and the government would convert unallocated public lands near the highway into protected areas. None of these measures were mentioned in the DNIT’s announcement, or in the call for bids.

The day after the call for bids was made, longtime Lula ally Marina Silva stepped down as minister of the environment to run for a Senate seat in the upcoming elections. She had been resisting the pressure to accelerate the road’s environmental licensing. A few days later, the IBAMA president, Rodrigo Agostinho, who had also expressed concerns about the paving, also quit to embark on his own campaign. Both resignations were already expected to comply with election rules.

Before leaving office, Agostinho said in an interview with the Brazilian magazine Cenarium that “IBAMA’s technical team believes that construction can only begin once the licensing process has been completed.”

 

Banner image: BR-319’s midsection has remained unpaved since the highway’s inauguration in 1976. Now, the road’s rebuilding is the subject of one of Brazil’s fiercest environmental debates in recent times. Image courtesy of DNIT.

Brazil’s Congress passes ‘devastation bill’ in major environmental setback

Citation:

Ferrante, L., Schiesari, L., Haddad, C. F., Morellato, L. P., Williams, E., Leão, J., … Hrbek, T. (2026). Amazon infrastructure poses biosecurity risks. Science, 392(6794), 156-157. doi:10.1126/science.aeg1212