RIO DE JANEIRO (CN) - A Rio de Janeiro court ordered the state government to examine public school infrastructure and create an emergency adaptation plan after dozens of extreme heat episodes in classrooms, in a January ruling that could set a precedent for climate adaptation litigation in Brazil's education system.

The decision comes just weeks before the school year is scheduled to start at the beginning of February. Increasingly frequent and intense heat waves have exposed inadequate conditions in a large share of the nation's public schools.

A 2024 survey by the Center for Innovations for Public Policy Excellence, based on data from the 2023 School Census, found only 34% of classrooms in Brazil's public school system have any form of climate control.

According to the Rio de Janeiro state prosecutor's office, which filed the civil lawsuit, there were 52 incidents classified as serious in state schools throughout 2025 linked to students' exposure to unsafe temperatures, including fainting episodes in classrooms that reached about 108 F.

Episodes of extreme heat in schools also prompted student mobilization in 2025. In April, the Brazilian Union of Secondary Students launched a reporting channel called "Classroom Sauna," which collected 150 complaints in the first 10 days, including reports of schools without fans or air conditioning, broken equipment and classrooms lacking adequate windows.

The Rio de Janeiro state education department said in a statement that 1,135 school units - nearly 97% of the network - have climate-controlled environments.

The department said it is continuing efforts to fully climatize the remaining 37 schools and maintains an ongoing action plan to expand cooling across the state network. 

The department says it carried out more than 600 construction projects in 2025, including maintenance work, electrical system upgrades, increased energy capacity and the installation of covered sports courts to reduce heat exposure. It has also transferred funds directly to schools for maintenance and equipment purchases, including fans as a temporary solution.

Ariel de Castro Alves, one of Brazil's leading experts on child rights, said exposing children and adolescents to extreme heat in classrooms violates the rights to health and education guaranteed by the Constitution and the Child and Adolescent Statute.

He said Brazilian law establishes full protection for children and requires public authorities to ensure school environments that are safe and adequate for educational development.

"This lawsuit sets an important precedent," Alves said. 

He added that subjecting students to unsafe environments violates the principle of absolute priority guaranteed to children and adolescents by the Constitution and the statute, which requires preferential treatment in public policy-making and privileged allocation of resources to youth and childhood programs.

"Extreme heat has long affected parts of the country, but in recent years it has spread to states and municipalities that were not previously exposed to such temperatures," Alves said. "Even so, public authorities still fail to plan schools and school construction to ensure healthy, well-ventilated environments with adequate cooling."

Alves said the Ministry of Education should establish national guidelines and protocols to help states and municipalities adapt schools to extreme climate events.

The Ministry of Education said in a statement it is monitoring the impacts of extreme climate events on public schools and providing technical support to education networks under Brazil's cooperative federal system.

The ministry also said it launched the Guide for Educational Actions in Response to Climate Emergencies in September 2025, offering guidance to help states and municipalities organize educational responses to situations such as heat waves, floods and droughts.

Luciana Della Nina Gambi, a legal researcher who studied climate litigation in her doctoral work at the University of Sao Paulo, said the Rio case can be considered an example of climate litigation in Brazil because it relied on a civil lawsuit to compel the state to develop an emergency adaptation plan for the public school system.

"This makes it clear that the initiative goes beyond defending the rights of a single student in a single school," she said.

Gambi said when public policies or state action on climate adaptation are lacking, climate litigation is likely to be used increasingly as a tool to enforce rights - including the right to education.

She added that the lawsuit seeks to resolve an urgent situation where students cannot stay in inadequate classrooms but also creates institutional tensions.

"In general, debates about the judicialization of public policy run into constitutional and democratic issues, especially regarding separation of powers and the limits of judicial action," she said. "But the main constraint on litigation involving essential public services like education is the cost of rights. The state has to spend money to ensure that all students can be present in classrooms in a safe and healthy way."

Luciana Bauer, a lawyer and member of the JusClima collective, which works with strategic climate litigation in Brazil, said the Rio ruling reflects a recent shift in the trajectory of climate litigation, which has moved beyond focusing solely on deforestation, biomes and carbon emissions to addressing the protection of people's basic rights in daily life.

She said climate litigation is becoming more focused on protecting rights in cities, like the right to safe temperatures, as extreme heat events directly affect everyday life and essential public services.

"Prosecutors will increasingly bring such cases, mainly in defense of life and a minimum level of climate dignity for every human being," she said.

Bauer said the main challenge for climate litigation in Brazil today lies within the judiciary itself, pointing to a gap between the theoretical recognition of climate rights and their practical enforcement in court rulings.

"There is a gap between judges knowing that climate rights exist and actually issuing rulings that guarantee those rights to people," she said.

Bauer said the Rio case itself was only upheld on appeal after being rejected at the trial court level, which she said reflects resistance among some judges to recognize climate rights as legally enforceable.

She added that in many cases there is reluctance to treat these rights as "new rights," even in urgent situations.

"People are effectively dying from heat. Heat waves are more deadly than, for example, floods," she said.

Courthouse News reporter Marilia Marasciulo is based in Brazil.

Source: Courthouse News Service