Abstract

The Amazon Basin faces compound climate and anthropogenic disturbances, including prolonged droughts, intensified wildfire events, river hydrological fluctuations, and deforestation pressure, which continuously threaten the livelihood stability and ecological security of rural riverine communities in remote Amazonian territories. Rural Amazonian communities are highly dependent on forest and river ecosystem services, yet they are often marginalized in terms of communication infrastructure, early warning access, and environmental governance participation. In recent years, low‑cost satellite internet, mobile broadband networks and community‑managed digital platforms have gradually expanded into remote Amazonian rural settlements, bringing new pathways for local residents to obtain climate hazard information, share traditional ecological knowledge, coordinate collective disaster response and optimize natural resource management. Digital inclusion, defined as equitable access to digital infrastructure, digital skill mastery and meaningful participation in online information ecosystems, has become a potential driver to strengthen community‑level climate resilience. Nevertheless, existing literature on Amazon climate adaptation research still contains notable gaps. Most prior studies focus on biophysical monitoring of deforestation and wildfire risk, while few quantitative empirical studies explore how digital inclusion shapes community climate resilience in marginalized rural Amazonian settlements. The multi‑dimensional mechanism linking digital infrastructure access, local digital capacity building, and the three pillars of community resilience (absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, transformative capacity) remains insufficiently unpacked. Moreover, the moderating role of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), a core cultural asset of Indigenous and riverine populations of the Amazon, has rarely been integrated into quantitative empirical models, despite its critical role in local hazard coping. This study constructs a multiple mediation theoretical framework based on social‑ecological systems theory and community resilience theory. Using cross‑sectional survey data collected from 547 household respondents across 17 rural Amazonian riverine communities in the Brazilian Amazon, this paper decomposes digital inclusion into three measurable dimensions: infrastructure access, digital literacy, and participatory digital engagement. The research examines how digital inclusion affects community climate resilience through the mediating variables of climate hazard information access and collective action for ecosystem management, and further tests whether traditional ecological knowledge positively moderates the primary paths of this model. Empirical results demonstrate that digital inclusion exerts a significant positive total effect on rural Amazonian community climate resilience. Access to climate hazard information and collective ecosystem management action jointly play a parallel multiple mediating role in this relationship. Traditional ecological knowledge positively moderates the association between digital inclusion and access to climate hazard information: communities with richer inherited traditional ecological knowledge can better integrate digital climate data with indigenous environmental observation experience, thereby amplifying the resilience‑building effect brought by digital inclusion. Multi‑group heterogeneity analysis reveals that communities with formal community digital governance committees and communities closer to regional urban service hubs exhibit stronger mediation effects, while isolated remote communities face bottlenecks from insufficient digital literacy even when basic internet infrastructure is deployed. This research contributes to social‑ecological system scholarship by quantifying the digital pathways of climate resilience in understudied Amazonian rural communities. The findings offer empirical evidence for Brazilian environmental agencies and regional non‑governmental organizations to design inclusive digital climate adaptation programs tailored for riverine and small Indigenous settlements, and provide a replicable analytical framework for studying digital resilience in other tropical forest rural regions worldwide.

Keywords: Amazon Rural Communities; Digital Inclusion; Community Climate Resilience; Traditional Ecological Knowledge; Climate Hazard Information; Social‑Ecological System; Collective Action; Digital Literacy

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