ICTs and climate change adaptation in developing countries: the e-resilience approach

Climate change impacts are playing an increasing role within the set of development challenges that affect developing countries. Acnowledging the need for innovative adaptation strategies, the presentation will explore the linkages that exist between climate change impacts, adaptation and ICTs within vulnerable communities.

The analysis will be based on a conceptual framework that explores the notion of ‘e-resilience’ as a key property through which ICTs may strengthen the capacity of vulnerable systems to withstand, recover, adapt and potentially transform in the face of increasing climate change impacts and uncertainty.

It will be argued that access and use of ICTs can help strengthen the adaptive capacity of communities by enabling the key components of resilience: self-organisation, diversity, flexibility, redundancy, rapidity, learning and cross-scale interactions, among others.