This Complementary Law, consisting of 124 articles is structured in nine main Titles and several Chapters. The State Environmental Policy comprises the set of administrative and technical directives with the purpose of guiding governmental actions for the rational use of environmental resources, as well as for the preservation, improvement and recovery of environmental quality conducive to life, ensuring conditions for socio-economic development, security interests and protection of the dignity of human life, observing the following basic principles: governmental action in maintaining the ecological balance, considering the environment as a public patrimony to be necessarily secured and protected, with a view to collective use; rational use and exploitation of natural resources so as not to jeopardize the ecological balance; plan and monitor the use of natural resources; protect of ecosystems, including specially protected territorial areas and their representative components through planning, zoning and control of potentially or effectively degrading activities; monitoring the state of environmental quality; recovery of degraded areas; protection of areas threatened with degradation; promote environmental education at all levels, etc. The State Environmental Policy has the following objectives: establish criteria and standards of environmental quality and standards for the use and management of natural resources; reconcile economic and social development with the preservation of environment; define priority areas for governmental action related to the environmental quality protection and the maintenance of ecological balance, taking into account local peculiarities for the benefit of the community involved; ensure the participation of civil society, in environmental planning, in control, in the monitoring of the environment and in situations of ecological interest; establish the obligation to recover or indemnify damages caused to the environment by the public or private debtor, without prejudice to the application of appropriate administrative and penal sanctions; promote and encourage basic and applied research, as well as the development of national technologies aimed at the rational use of environmental resources; exercise the Power of Administrative Police, to condition and restrict the use and enjoyment of individual assets, activities and rights, in order to maintain the ecological balance.
巴西 · 1994-08-18