Font Size: 

In Brazil, the association between emergency decrees and the occurrence of climate anomalies is often made in the mainstream literature and news, often mistaking one for the other. This has hindered and delayed the depth of discussions on the socioeconomic factors involved in the persistent vulnerability of certain social groups when exposed to these and other threats, severe or extreme events of an environmental, biological or technological nature. Such negligence produces inefficient management in disaster risk reduction, expressed by their speech and actions biased due to cognitive barriers to technical and governmental authorities at the three levels of power (national, state and municipal), which do not allow them to reach the complexity of the socioeconomic processes involved. This results in the national history of trivializing the occurrence of disasters, which spread and intensify in all regions of the country. In other words, the public authorities do not present appropriate repertoire to guide a new public agenda on the topic of disaster risk reduction and overcome the current naïve narratives about resilience. Using information-theory techniques originally developed to tackle neuroscience problems, we were able to infer the complex system structure of social and economic dynamics involved in emergency decreeing over a twenty-year period (2003-2022). Through a cross-scalar approach, we focused on the temporal dynamics of recurrence of emergency decrees in the most critical municipalities, federative units, and macroregions of the country; that is, those that systematically live in a state of crisis. Once selected, through bio-inspired models from the brain as analogues, these findings were compared to the available socioeconomic time series, from a similar period, which allowed us to characterize the aforementioned critical spatialities, such as GDP, municipal revenue, employment level, and certain demographic characteristics (geographic distribution, size, and composition by age and sex) and infrastructure characteristics (housing and basic sanitation conditions, the latter related to household coverage of treated water and sewage collection). The contextual background was also the distributional inequality indicated by the Gini index and the quality of life, indicated by the HDI-M. The results showed that, in the analysed period and in the three spatial scales mentioned (local, state and macro-regional), the pattern of recurrences of emergencies accelerates over time, overlapping the time of normality, which creates, so to speak, a naturalization of living in a permanent context of emergency. It was observed that economic oscillations, particularly decreases in tax revenue and GDP - that is, public and private financial conditions - are associated with the declaration of emergencies, as well as distributive inequalities and sanitation bottlenecks. This demonstrates that the appropriate approach to disaster risk reduction is about formulating new public management mechanisms to point to another development model - through greater agility in implementing policies for universalizing basic sanitation, social and economic inclusiveness - without which the confrontation with adverse events of various natures will not be successful.