President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) approved a law that authorizes the pruning and felling of trees in cases where the responsible environmental agencies do not return the request within 45 days.
With the new legislation, this practice no longer constitutes an offense in situations where there is a proven risk of accident, which must be certified by a competent company or professional.
The change amends the Environmental Offenses Act, which establishes guidelines for the management of these trees, both in public and private spaces.
The law now authorizes the hiring of a qualified professional to carry out pruning or pruning independently, once the 45-day period has passed without official notice.
The request for arboricultural development in these risky cases must be supported by a report from a company or a qualified professional.
Sanctioned last week, the new law was born from project 542/2022, written by deputy Vinicius Carvalho (Republicanos-SP). The proposal was approved by the Chamber of Deputies in 2022 and by the Senate in early December of this year.
In São Paulo, the channel to request the service is central 156. Today, the response time granted to agencies is much longer than that established by federal law, with 120 days for return.
With the series of power outages that hit the capital of São Paulo after the storms, responsibility for tree pruning became the subject of a dispute between the Municipality of Ricardo Nunes (MDB) and the electricity supply company Enel.
As a general rule, the town hall is responsible for public afforestation policy and carries out pruning outside the electrical risk zone. Enel, according to an agreement signed in 2020, prepares the annual tree management plan in controlled and at-risk areas of electrical installations.
Currently, the municipality accuses Enel of not having respected an annual tree pruning plan. In a memo released this month, Nunes management said Enel had committed to pruning 282,271 trees, but had only achieved 11% of the promise — there were 31,945 prunings.
Ener, in turn, responded to the management of Nunes, affirming that the company carried out approximately 230 thousand prunings throughout the year 2025 and stressed that the city hall system was obsolete.
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