Ongoing ‘deliberations’ on the State Budget for 2021 (OE2021) have seen minority MPs push the government into agreeing to a strategic environmental impact study, at national level, for all mining projects – particularly those involving the extraction of lithium in the north and centre of Portugal (click here).
Communities threatened with the government’s lithium strategy have raised numerous protests and campaigns in a bid to highlight its very negative environmental consequences.
However, up till recently, objections looked like being largely sidelined in the name of ‘progress’ (click here). A combination of delays caused by the pandemic, and the lack of support for the government’s next State Budget (facing a final global vote in parliament tomorrow) has changed all this.
Thus the approval of proposals, by unsubscribed MP Joacine Katar Moreira (formerly of Livre) and PEV (the Greens) for the use of money from the Environmental Fund to “apply a strategic environmental impact evaluation for mining on a national scale, including regions where contracts for prospection and production have already been signed, or are expected to be signed”.
Ms Moreira’s proposal includes the understanding that the evaluation includes “analysis of the real costs inherent in mining, namely for populations and the State”.
