Senate chamber approves Environmental Assessment 2.0 bill that strengthens environmental institutions

This is an automated translation of the original release published in Spanish.

Release from the Ministry of the Environment of Chile

The Senate Chamber approved this Tuesday the bill that reforms the General Environmental Framework Law (19,300), called Environmental Assessment 2.0, which strengthens and makes the Environmental Impact Assessment System more efficient.

The Minister of the Environment, Maisa Rojas, after evaluating the approval of the initiative, pointed out that it is a “bill balanced between care for the environment and economic growth Environmental evaluation is not an obstacle to development, but rather a necessary path to achieve it.”

She added that “the initiative seeks to reduce uncertainties and processing times in the evaluation, review and modification stages of projects. It is a proposal that improves our institutionality towards the future, for which we need transversal agreements, in order for this regulation to be stable over time and allow us to make economic growth compatible with the care of the environment to have sustainable development in our country."

Let us remember that the project was submitted for processing in January of this year and that the objective of this reform is to optimize environmental evaluation to provide certainty and improve processes, with the consequent reduction of times in environmental processing, without reducing protection standards of environmental assessment.

After the general approval of the Environmental Assessment 2.0 project, it will now return to the Senate Committee on the Environment, Climate Change and National Assets for discussion in particular.