• 5 min de lectura
• 5 min de lectura
The Ministry of Ports and Airports (MPor) is opening a 30-day public consultation, starting this Thursday (24), on the proposed insurance policy for concession contracts and other forms of private participation in port, airport, and waterway infrastructure. The initiative seeks to clarify the identification and distribution of project risks from the planning phase, as well as to align insurance requirements with the capacity effectively available in the market.
The proposal stipulates that new Technical, Economic, and Environmental Feasibility Studies (EVTEA) must now include an Insurability and Insurance Availability Study. This analysis should assess, for each relevant risk, the possibility of contracting coverage, the conditions offered by the insurance and reinsurance market, and alternatives for cases where insurance is unavailable or insufficient.
The Minister of Ports and Airports, Tomé Franca, explains that the policy stems from the need to prepare infrastructure for risks that can affect the continuity of services, especially given the impacts of climatic events. "What is our objective? To identify, map the risks of our infrastructure so that we can ensure that these infrastructures are more resilient, that is, prepared for the future. It also aims to bring concession contracts closer to the realities we encounter in each of these contracts. To prepare these infrastructures for climatic disasters, the impacts that climate change brings to our infrastructures," he stated.
Under the proposal, risk assessment will no longer be concentrated solely at the bidding stage and will become part of the project's structuring. The study must consider aspects such as the probability of each event occurring, its possible impacts, responsibility for management, risk reduction mechanisms (mitigation), and contractual treatment.
The analysis must also formally consult the Superintendence of Private Insurance (Susep) and the insurance and reinsurance market, with statements from at least three national brokers or insurers. Based on this information, each risk can be classified as insurable, partially insurable, or uninsurable.
In practice, the measure seeks to prevent contracts from establishing coverage requirements incompatible with market reality. The proposal determines that, before the publication of bids, a market consultation must be carried out to confirm the offer, capacity, and contracting conditions of the foreseen coverages.
The draft ordinance provides that the guidelines will be mandatorily applied to new EVTEAs whose terms of reference are issued after the publication of the norm. For ongoing studies and existing contracts, specific transition rules are provided, preserving the economic-financial balance of already established contracts.
The proposal establishes three main categories:
Ordinary risks: considered predictable and recurring, they should be primarily addressed through operational management and, where coverage is available, through specific policies.
Residual risks: correspond to the portions that remain uncovered, for example, due to deductibles, sub-limits, or contractual exclusions.
Extraordinary risks: characterized by low frequency and high severity, and that exceed the proven capacity of the insurance and reinsurance market.
For the category of extraordinary risks, the proposal foresees alternative mitigation instruments. These include sharing mechanisms with objective triggers, parametric insurance, automatic economic-financial rebalancing, and complementary state participation, within the limits provided by law and the contract.
The draft also establishes that the unavailability of certain coverage must be proven by negative technical statements from at least three brokers or insurers. In these cases, the coverage requirement may be temporarily suspended, with verification renewed within a period of up to 12 months, without implying an automatic transfer of risk to the public authority.
The elaboration of the proposal is the result of the work of the Working Group on Insurance, Guarantees, and Risks in Transport Infrastructure (GT-SegInfra), created by MPor in August of this year. The group brings together representatives from the national secretariats of Ports, Civil Aviation, and Waterways, the National Civil Aviation Agency (Anac), the National Waterway Transport Agency (Antaq), as well as representatives from the private sector and the insurance market.
Created with a 100-day deadline to present recommendations, GT-SegInfra aimed to build solutions to increase the legal certainty of projects, align insurance requirements with market capacity, and contribute to the structuring of new ventures.
One of the cases that help explain the need to improve risk management is that of Salgado Filho International Airport, in Porto Alegre. The 2024 floods left the runway and terminal submerged and interrupted airport operations for months.
According to Tomé Franca, the experience showed the need for clearer rules for risk distribution and for defining the necessary coverages. "A public policy guideline, a national security policy for infrastructure, ensures clear risk allocation so that, in situations like this, the public authority can demand from concession contracts compliance, the contracting of adequate insurance, and risk sharing in the most efficient way," said the minister.
The consultation aims to receive contributions from insurers, concessionaires, public agents, investors, sector entities, and society. The contributions will be used to refine the proposal before the definitive publication of the policy.
The documents that are part of the consultation, including the draft normative act, Informative Note 3/2026/DECON-MPOR/SE-MPOR, and Regulatory Impact Analysis Report (AIR) 1/2026/DECON, are available on the Brasil Participativo platform and on the official MPor website. Contributions, which must be identified and substantiated, must be sent exclusively through the electronic form available on the platform.
"What we want, in the end, is security for the State, but also security for those who invest, so that we can have clear rules for risk allocation and coverage. We want more resilient contracts with greater legal certainty," concluded the minister.