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

Professor Wai Fong Boh from the Division of Information Technology and Operations Management (ITOM), Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, is the lead author of a new commentary in Management Science titled “Digital Resilience for the Climate Crisis: A Multi-Perspective Analysis.”

The commentary examines how digital technologies can be used to improve organisational resilience in the context of climate change. It highlights that climate-related risks form a complex problem space that spans a wide range of phenomena, including floods and landslides, disruptions to global supply chains, heat waves, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions and food insecurity.

To address this complexity, the authors assembled five scholarly teams with expertise in different problem topics, research approaches and theoretical perspectives. Each team identified and problematised a specific facet of digital resilience for the climate crisis. Together, their perspectives offer a set of rich narratives, including:

• Digital resilience in the context of floods and landslides in Brazil and Indonesia
• Conceptual development that explicitly incorporates the natural environment alongside people and technology
• A reconceptualisation of the problem space in terms of time and type of climate-related challenges
• Two application areas of digital resilience in global supply chains and carbon emissions tracking

From this multi-perspective examination, the commentary identifies four transcending themes for understanding and developing digital resilience for the climate crisis:

1. The need to integrate nature into sociotechnical thinking
2. The importance of examining actions at both micro and macro levels
3. The inclusion of both reactive and proactive strategies
4. Viewing the climate crisis as a process, rather than a series of discrete events

The authors emphasise that such a perspective is necessary to build the fundamental knowledge and practical solutions required for digital resilience in the face of climate change. The commentary explicitly aims to motivate other scholars, especially those adopting diverse theoretical lenses, to join in advancing this research agenda.

Authors:

Wai Fong Boh, Nigel P. Melville, João Baptista, Friedrich Chasin, Flavio Horita, Anne Ixmeier, Steven L. Johnson, Suprateek Sarker, Wolfgang Ketter, Johann Kranz, Shaila Miranda, Ning Nan, Brian T. Pentland, Jan Recker, Sepide Sadeghi, Saonee Sarker, Juliana Sutanto, Ping Wang, Wahyu Wilopo