Digital Resilience for the Climate Crisis: A Multi-Perspective Analysis

This commentary explores multiple perspectives on the potential use of digital technologies to improve organizational resilience in the context of climate change. Such an approach is needed to address this complex problem space, especially since it encompasses a wide variety of phenomena, including floods and landslides, disruptions to global supply chains, heat waves, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and food insecurity. We assembled a diverse set of five scholarly teams specializing in multiple problem topics, research approaches, and theoretical perspectives on this project. Each team identified and problematized a specific facet of digital resilience for the climate crisis. The perspectives cover a range of rich narratives, including digital resilience in the context of floods and landslides in Brazil and Indonesia, conceptual development efforts incorporating the natural environment with people and technology, reconceptualization of the problem space in terms of time and type, and two applications of digital resilience in the domains of global supply chains and carbon emissions tracking. This research commentary thus presents a multi-perspective examination and interrogation of digital resilience for addressing the climate crisis, out of which four transcending themes emerge: the need to integrate nature into sociotechnical thinking, the need to examine actions at both micro and macro levels, the need to include both reactive and proactive strategies, and the need to view climate crisis as a process rather than a series of events. This commentary aims to motivate other scholars who take diverse theoretical perspectives to join us in developing fundamental knowledge and practical solutions needed to achieve digital resilience for the climate crisis.