What Lies Behind the Acute Crises: The Social and Infrasystems Links with Disasters in Brazil

In recent years, Brazilian municipalities have had to deal with increasing numbers of crises, such as disasters. Infrastructural systems (infrasystems) play a critical role in determining the social and physical extents of a crisis. They are linked to the institutional view adopted in crisis prevention and response and may serve to weaken citizenship rights in the country. In this context, this chapter highlights two features of the spatiotemporal dynamics of systemic crises in Brazilian municipalities from 2003 to 2018. First, we identify the social, health and infrastructural implications from the frequent occurrence of disasters in Brazil. Second, we use correlation and causal inference methods to assess the links between the number of emergency state decrees and socioeconomic, sociospatial, health or infrastructure variables. To assess the temporal causal relation between emergency and three variables (Gross Domestic Product, tax revenue and waterborne disease cases), we draw on methods from information theory (mutual information, causal mutual information and transfer entropy). We find that the frequency of emergency decrees issued by public administrations can be associated with socioeconomic variables.