I live in São Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil, home to some 12 million people – 20 million if you count the outskirts, which have been sprawling for three decades.
That makes the city an ideal place to observe the phenomena I research: complex social problems. In academia, this concept refers to problems such as corruption, crime, and drug trafficking—problems which, in practice, cannot be solved. They must simply be mitigated or managed.
São Paulo is a dense city, with not much green space and little to no animal life. Urban São Paulo has no squirrels or raccoons, there aren’t even that many birds. So I was astonished to learn, in January, that scorpions had infested my neighborhood. As it turned out, people across the city and São Paulo state were having the same problem with these dangerous, venomous bugs. State-wide, scorpion stings have increased threefold over the last two decades. Four kinds of scorpion live in Brazil, but historically they are only found in rural areas. São Paulo residents are urbanites. We have conquered nature. Or so we thought. Brazil’s scorpion infestation is the perfect example of how unpredictable modern life has become. It is a hallmark of what those of us in the complex problems field call a “VUCA” world—one that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Some 2.5 billion people worldwide, from Mexico to Russia, live in areas with scorpions, which generally prefer hot and dry ecosystems. But Brazil’s cities also provide excellent habitats for scorpions, experts say. They offer shelter in sewage networks, plenty of water, waste food that goes unclaimed, and crucially, no natural predators. Scorpions, like the cockroaches they feast on, are an incredibly adaptable species. As the weather in Brazil gets hotter due to climate change, scorpions are spreading across the country, including to its colder southern states that rarely, if ever, have had reports of scorpions prior to this millennium. The number of people stung by scorpions across Brazil has risen from 12,000 in 2000 to 140,000 last year, according to the health ministry. Most scorpion stings are extremely painful but not fatal. For children, however, they are more dangerous and require urgent medical attention. Eighty-eight people died from scorpion sting wounds in 2017, Brazil’s O Globo newspaper reports, highlighting the lack of adequate medical care available in small towns. Many of those dead were children. In Americana, a city of about 200,000 inhabitants in the interior of São Paulo state, teams performing nocturnal searches for scorpions captured more than 13,000 last year – that’s the equivalent of one scorpion for every 15 people. Worse yet, the species terrorizing Brazilians is the highly poisonous yellow scorpion, or Tityus serrulatus. It reproduces through the miracle of parthenogenesis, meaning a female scorpion simply generates copies of herself twice a year, with no male participation required. Each parthenogenesis can spawn up to 20 to 30 baby scorpions. Though most will die in their first days and weeks of life, ridding Brazilian cities of scorpions would be a herculean, if not downright impossible, task. Brazil’s urban scorpion infestation is a classic “wicked problem.” This term, first used in 1973 by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, refers to enormous social or cultural problems such as poverty and war—problems with no simple or definitive solution, and which arise at the intersection of other issues. Wicked problems are a symptom of numerous other related issues, both natural and human-made. In this case, Brazil’s urban scorpion infestation is the result of poor garbage management, inadequate sanitation, rapid urbanization, and a changing climate. It is likely too late to stop the spread of scorpions across Brazilian cities. In a VUCA world, my academic research and other problem-solving studies show, wicked problems should be identified and confronted as soon as possible, using an array of responses. Likewise, in a VUCA world, the more resources you throw at problems, the better. That could mean anything from public awareness campaigns to educate Brazilians about scorpions, to extermination task forces working to control populations in urban areas. Scientists should be involved. Brazil’s national public health system will need to adapt to this new threat. Brazil’s government appears to be ill-equipped to tackle the scorpion infestation. Despite dogged press coverage, federal health officials have barely spoken publicly about Brazil’s urban scorpion problem. And, beyond some rather tepid national and state-level efforts to train health officials in scorpion risks, authorities seem to have no plan for fighting the infestation at the epidemic level it is heading towards. Nor are cities likely to see any federal money dedicated to fighting this scorpion infestation: Brazil is only now coming out of a deep recession, and public health budgets have been slashed. Venomous yellow scorpions, I fear, have already claimed their place alongside violent crime, brutal drug trafficking and other chronic problems that urbanites in Brazil must cope with daily.
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Brazil’s urban scorpions
Wicked problems in a crazy world
Originally published on
The Conversation
