Paragominas inagurates a system for supporting environmental management

The tool, in a beta version, will be launched this week and the intention is to apply it in up to 50 other Pará municipalitie.

This Monday (March 23), the day on which Paragominas comemorates seven years of launching the Green Municipality Program, the city is inaugurating a new tool for supporting municipal management and environmental licensing, the Integrated System for Environmental Management – SIGAM. The objective of the system is to help decentralize environmental management in the State for the municipalities, a process that is already underway in Pará and is considered one of the solutions for improving environmental management.

SIGAM was developed to operate in an Environmental Secretariat, making available tools for following up procedures, documents and Geoprocessing. “SIGAM is a system that will computerize a process that currently happens through documents and paper photocopies. That will make monitoring, licensing and enforcement activities more agile,” explains Amintas Brandão Jr., a researcher at the Institute of People and the Environment of the Amazon (Imazon).

The system has been under development since 2013, in a partnership between Imazon, the Municipal Government of Paragominas, and the Green Municipality Program of the State of Pará, with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The principles of the system include fulfilling legal requirements for shared environmental management, the electronic automation of tasks and routines, and a high level of transparency and auditability, as well as integration with other systems.

For the Environmental Secretary of Paragominas, Jacqueline de Carvalho Peçanha, the major gain is that the entire process will become much more dynamic. “You get a bit away from the physical process and it becomes virtual. All of this process, whether lucensing, environmental registration or enforcement, will now be inside a platform that is much easier to access and can be visualuzed, both by technicians at the Secretariat and by producers who have requests for licensing, and can keep up with  their procedures from wherever they are, and can even anticipate things in case something is still unresolved. Without a doubt, it is a gain for environmental management in all of Pará,” she states.

After implementation in Paragominas, the idea is to expand the use of SIGAM to up to 50 other Pará municipalities, that have already decentralized or are in the process of decentralizing their environmental management.