BR do Mar will provide incentives for sustainable vessels, says Secretary of Waterways

According to Dino Antunes, the department is in the final stages of negotiations so that the text regulating the initiative can be published.

The BR do Mar program will include incentives for sustainable vessels, with the aim of reducing the environmental impacts of waterway transport in Brazil. The announcement was made this Monday (28) by the national secretary of Waterways of the Ministry of Ports and Airports, Dino Antunes, on the first day of the Regional Forum Sul Export, held in Porto Alegre (RS).

According to Dino, the department is in the final stages of negotiations so that the text regulating the initiative can be published. “We were drafting the decree, now all that is missing is a signature,” he said.

BR do Mar was created by the Federal Government to encourage cabotage — the transportation of cargo by sea along the Brazilian coast. The initiative seeks to reduce logistics costs, reduce overload on highways and increase efficiency in the movement of goods between the country's ports. In addition, the program aims to attract new investments to the naval sector and increase the competitiveness of the national industry.

The secretary said that the analysis on the inclusion of incentives for less polluting vessels was carried out by the Minister of Ports, Silvio Costa Filho. “We, the Technical Staff, drew up all the rules on what would be the BR do Mar regulation. We took them to the minister, who looked at them and said: 'Wait a minute, but where are the incentives for green vessels?'”, he mentioned. “And we went back to the drawing board to actually include the incentives, the criteria that will actually make us have more sustainable vessels here in Brazilian cabotage”, he added.

The program has been awaited by the logistics and infrastructure sector for more than 2 years, since Law 14,301/2022 was sanctioned.

ESG Culture

For Dino, the main difficulty in implementing ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) initiatives is cultural change. “We receive very clear guidance for this to happen,” said the secretary.

According to the authority, the sector needs to work better on the idea that financial returns on projects focused on sustainability take longer to become viable. “Investment is a problem because either it does not recover directly in financial terms, or it takes a long time for you to see this return. But none of this can be solved without a cultural change,” he noted.

The panel “InfraESG: Climate change and the impacts of this new reality on the transport infrastructure sector” was moderated by Núria Bianco, Market Intelligence Director at Grupo Brasil Export. Also participating in the debate were Cloves Benevides, Undersecretary of Sustainability at the Ministry of Transport, and Henrique Horn Ilha, Environment Director at Portos RS.