Why public transparency on certain personal data is essential to guarantee environmental justice?

Between 2022 and 2023, Data Privacy Brasil developed the project Environment and Information: contesting the political instrumentalization of LGPD in Environmental Regulation which focuses on the intersection of digital rights and environmental policies. The first phase of the project analysed a denial of a FOI request regarding personal information in the Environmental Rural Registry (CAR) database and argued for the possibility of amplifying public transparency. The second phase dealt with the lack of transparency of the Animal Transit Note (GTA), a sanitary warrant that allows for sanitary traceability of animal transportation – cattle farming and beef industry more specifically was the scope of the project.

In both reports a constant asymmetry was identified relating to how personal data from land and cattle owners were processed. Privacy is guaranteed over public interest and other fundamental rights and principles such as the right to an ecologically balanced environment, originary rights to the land, right to life and physical integrity, principle of dignity and economical order. This endorses illegal practices and damages from protected land invasion, illegal deforestation, increase in the vulnerability of local populations to violation of work laws, unfair competition, etc.

In this scenario of numerous irregularities and inequalities, the improvement of land monitoring and control and the expansion of cattle traceability to include an environmental perspective are of extreme importance. Additionally, transparency of identifiers as individual or cooperative taxpayer number is fundamental in order to allow social control to request public action towards violations of environmental law and to blow the whistle on potential illegal deforestation and other illicit or unethical conducts. Public transparency in this case also allows for a detailed analysis of the market of suppliers which gives more autonomy for citizens as consumers.

That said, during the course of the project, it was clear the importance of CAR as  digital public infrastructure that has the potential to be molded to guarantee efficient data sharing and interoperability between databases such as GTA – which could lead to a preliminary model of traceability led by the government. An in-depth analysis on the relation of climate change and digital public infrastructures is presented in the report Digital Public Infrastructures & Digital Public Goods for Combating Climate Change: The Brazil Case Study, a result of a DPGA funded project. The theme of environment and digital media is discussed in the Politics article The nexus between environment and digital age passing through difficulties of transparency to exploitation of natural resources to fuel digital innovation and advance. 

In order to best summarise the problems that are related to the lack of public transparency of data necessary to achieve climate justice, and also listing its consequences and recommendations to help to solve them, Data Privacy Brasil published two policy papers regarding each phase of the project Environment and information.

You can access the policy papers on the links below:

Environmental policies, public transparency and data protection: the legal viability of sharing personal data within the scope of the Rural Environmental Registry

Datafication of Meat: the essential nature of personal data for traceability, monitoring and accountability in the meat production chain in Brazil