Toward a digital resilience

Abstract

As we contend with human impacts on the biosphere, there is rightfully a great emphasis now on community adaptation and resilience to climate change. Recent innovations in information technologies and analyses are helping communities to become more resilient. However, not often discussed in this vein is a path toward digital resilience. If mapping and information tools are to help communities, it stands to reason that they must be resilient themselves, as well as the data that they are based on. In other words, digital tools can help make communities resilient by providing data, evidence-based advice on community decisions, etc., but the resilience of the tools themselves can also be an issue. Digital resilience means that to the greatest extent possible, data and tools should be freely accessible, interchangeable, operational, of high quality, and up-to-date so that they can help give rise to the resilience of communities or other entities using them. Given the speed at which humans are altering the biosphere, the usefulness and effectiveness of these technologies must keep pace. This article reviews and recommends three fundamental digital practices, particularly from the standpoint of geospatial data and for community resilience and policy-making. These are: (1) create and implement a culture that consistently shares not only data, but workflows and use cases with the data, especially within maps and geographic information systems or GIS; (2) use maps and other visuals to tell compelling stories that many different kinds of audiences will understand and remember; and (3) be more open to different kinds of partnerships to reduce project costs, yield better results, and foster public awareness and behavioral change.