Challenges and Progress in Brazil: Insights from Education, Climate, and Human Rights Experts
Alongside Stanford’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Center for Human Rights and International Justice recently co-sponsored “Brazil: Challenges & Progress,” a panel discussion exploring critical education, climate, and labor-related issues in the world’s fifth most-populous nation.
Prof. Guilherme Lichand from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, an expert on educational inequities across the global South, kicked off the discussion by highlighting the widening enrollment gap between white and non-white student populations in Brazil. Although middle and high school enrollment has doubled over the past six years, Lichand said, countless Brazilian students struggle to complete basic schooling. These gaps in educational opportunities reflect broader sociopolitical and racial divides: Among the 2 million young people not attending school in Brazil in 2023, for instance, a UNICEF report found that 63 percent were Black.
Lichand emphasized that the future of Brazilian education hinges on the new national high school curriculum, which is yet to be passed in the Brazilian Senate. Under this new curriculum, Technical, Vocational, and Educational Training (TVET) will be widely available to high school students. Currently, only 9% of high school-aged students are accessing the curriculum.
“(TVET) is going to increase fast and will give students an opportunity to first increase their likelihood of finishing high school," said Lichand, adding that he hopes this curriculum will decrease inequity in high school completion and earnings among white and non-white students.
Following Lichand’s presentation, Prof. Rob Jackson shifted the discussion from educational inequity to ecological crisis. Given that 60% of the Amazon rainforest falls within Brazilian borders, Jackson emphasized the responsibility of the Brazilian government to confront climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss.
Although deforestation rates rose during the Bolsonaro presidency, Jackson stated that the situation has improved since President Lula da Silva assumed office in 2023: “[Rates of deforestation] are now historically lower than they used to be — substantially lower," Jackson said.
Jackson highlighted “climate colonialism,” a concept which links environmental degradation to centuries of colonial extraction, as a key lens for analyzing ecological crises across the Global South. He credited Pakistan’s former Federal Minister of Climate Change Sherry Rehman, who noted that countries that contribute very little to carbon emissions are often among those most impacted by climate change. From rising temperatures in Amazon rivers to increased methane release in wetlands, Jackson noted, many climate ‘changes’ reflect the enduring legacy of colonial exploitation.
Continuing the discussion on the Amazon, Prof. Octávio Ferraz of King’s College London, a Brazilian legal scholar who specializes in human rights and development, emphasized the imperative of protecting the Amazon’s immense biodiversity. While just 2.5 acres of the Amazon contain “more biodiversity of trees than in all of North America,” Ferraz noted that industries like beef, soy, wood, and mining destroy about 5,000 square kilometers of rainforest (an area about 50 times the size of Paris) each year. He credited the Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon (PPCDAm), first launched in 2004, with slowing deforestation in recent years. The PPCDAm includes measures such as creating conservation units, protecting indigenous territories, strengthening environmental enforcement agencies, monitoring exports produced on illegally deforested lands, and enhancing satellite monitoring systems.
Beyond safeguarding the physical environment, Ferraz pointed out that the Brazilian Constitution recognizes the right to a healthy ecological environment as a human right and called out the need to protect both the land and the people who safeguard the environment given alarming rates of murdered environmentalists in recent years.
The final speaker, Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab Research Director Dr. Kim Babiarz, focused on her team’s work to combat forced labor in Brazil, particularly among charcoal workers in the Brazilian Amazon. Babiarz emphasized the high rates of such labor exploitation among workers in agricultural jobs. Common indicators of human trafficking in this sector include deceptive employment recruitment, degrading living or working conditions, restricted movement or surveillance, and debt bondage. Babiarz stated that human trafficking is "a global health issue, with long-term emotional, physical, psychological, and economic harms." She described how advances in technology, data science, and social science research methods enable progress in the fight against human trafficking. For example, the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab uses satellite imagery to identify likely sites where illegal deforestation intersects with forced labor based on the unique aerial footprints of charcoal arrays. Babiarz presented learnings from a 2023 Lab trip to Brazil to implement this remote detection tool in partnership with Brazilian Federal Labor Prosecutors, which led to more efficient and effective inspections.
During the subsequent Q&A portion of the event, the audience inquired about the role of digital governance in Brazil, the general experience of trafficked individuals, the Amazon 4.0 economy, and the feasibility and societal impact of achieving zero deforestation in the Amazon. The panel was followed by a screening of "Orphan Mothers," a powerful documentary on police violence in Rio de Janeiro.