Abstract

Climate change has intensified the frequency and severity of extreme hydrometeorological events across the Amazon Basin, including prolonged droughts, catastrophic river flooding and destructive forest fires, all of which disproportionately threaten the livelihood security of rural, Indigenous and riverine communities that reside within the region. While mainstream climate resilience scholarship has long centered on physical infrastructure, agricultural adaptation and disaster relief systems, a growing body of social science research has begun to examine digital inclusion as a critical social determinant of community‑level adaptive capacity. Digital inclusion refers not merely to basic internet connectivity, but also encompasses affordable mobile devices, usable local‑language digital content, digital literacy skills, and trusted local institutions capable of translating online information into practical community action. Rural Amazonian communities occupy a unique position in global climate research: these populations live in geographically remote terrain, rely directly on forest and river ecosystems for subsistence, and have historically faced structural barriers including limited state services, poor transportation networks and low telecommunications coverage. Many prior climate studies treat information access as a simple binary variable, distinguishing communities with internet access from those without, while overlooking the layered inequalities of digital inclusion. Even when mobile internet is technically available, low digital literacy, limited local‑language resources and unstable power supply may prevent residents from using digital tools to respond to climate hazards. This study constructs a conceptual model to test the hypothesis that digital inclusion positively predicts community climate resilience, with collective environmental knowledge acting as a mediating variable. Collective environmental knowledge describes locally accumulated, intergenerational ecological understanding of regional weather patterns, river dynamics and forest ecosystem responses to disturbance. Cross‑sectional questionnaire data were collected from rural households distributed across Brazilian Amazon riverine municipalities. The final valid sample contained 827 household representatives. Survey instruments combined standardized digital inclusion scales, community resilience measurement frameworks and locally adapted items capturing traditional ecological knowledge. Bootstrapping mediation analysis was used to test the proposed indirect pathway. Analytical results demonstrate that higher digital inclusion levels significantly predict greater collective environmental knowledge within communities, and collective environmental knowledge in turn exerts a significant positive predictive effect on community climate resilience. The mediation test confirms a statistically significant indirect effect, indicating collective environmental knowledge partially mediates the association between digital inclusion and climate resilience. These findings reveal a dual function of digital technologies within Amazonian rural settings: mobile internet platforms can serve as vessels to preserve, share and update local ecological knowledge, while also delivering real‑time meteorological alerts and climate adaptation guidance. However, digital access alone cannot automatically build resilience; meaningful resilience gains emerge only when digital infrastructure connects external climate data with existing community‑based environmental knowledge systems. This research contributes to environmental sociology and digital development studies by integrating traditional ecological knowledge and digital inclusion theories within a climate resilience empirical framework. Policy implications for regional telecommunication investment, bilingual climate information services and community digital literacy programming are discussed, together with careful reflection on risks such as digital extraction, misinformation and unequal distribution of digital benefits within marginalized rural communities.

Keywords: digital inclusion; climate resilience; traditional ecological knowledge; Amazon Basin; rural communities; environmental sociology

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