The Digital Divide and Climate Disasters

An open tablet computer sits on a wooden table before an empty wooden chair with a blue cushion. — Image credit: Rinald Rolle on Unsplash

In a region still struggling to recover from September’s Hurricane Helene, heavy rain combined with February’s melting ice and snow from unseasonably warm temperatures delivered a devastating flood to central Appalachia. The climate disaster was much like the floods that came before it, in 2021 and 2022, which cut off the region with impassable roads, downed power lines, damaged cables, and internet service loss.

Providing rescue services, shelter, food, and water to residents will always come first, before the long process of rebuilding infrastructure. But what, in today’s digital age, can be done about the infrastructure of the internet: a public utility that we rely on for everything from accessing bank accounts to learning about and applying for federal disaster aid?

As the nonprofit Internet Society Foundation explains, “The growing risk of natural and climate-related disasters is causing more and more disruption to people’s lives. These disasters often lead to loss of Internet connectivity, leaving individuals isolated from their loved ones and from vital information during times of crisis.”

But that’s not all. According to the organization, the internet has become an indispensable tool for emergency responders and noted that “without the ability to exchange crucial information about recovery updates or where, for example, a flood is heading next, potential damage can grow exponentially.”

We witnessed in the Los Angeles, CA, wildfires earlier this year, how crucial an app can be to warn residents of approaching danger. The app Watch Duty connected people with verified reports of fires from on-the-ground first responders and helped firefighters know where to move next. In 2024, Watch Duty had 7.2 million active users. During the January fires, the app added half a million more. Yet across the country, the most underresourced areas also have poor internet connectivity, leaving communities even more vulnerable when disaster strikes.

Internet Poverty

A 2019 report from the US Department of Health and Human Services noted that over one in six people living in poverty had no access to the internet. According to the report, White and Asian people were more likely than any other racial and ethnic groups to have not only internet access, but broadband internet access as well. Lack of affordability, historic disinvestment, and diminished availability of internet infrastructure in Black, Latine, and Native communities all contribute to this disparity.

Once the immediate recovery needs have passed, fight for subsidies that help low-income households.

Globally, Africa struggles the most with internet poverty, with 524 million people unconnected to the online world, according to a Brookings Institute study. This is also the case in the Caribbean, where island nations’ changing geography due to rising sea levels, makes developing internet infrastructure difficult.

In the United States, there are immediate and tactical steps that can be taken to address the digital divide and support disaster recovery in remote, rural, or underserved regions like Appalachia.

In a 2024 article, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) outlined what can be done to ensure that everyone has access to key digital information in the wake of a climate disaster:

First, provide emergency internet access through free public Wi-Fi, mobile hotspots, and satellite internet. “In rural, remote, or hard-to-reach areas where traditional infrastructure may take longer to restore, satellite internet ensures continuous connectivity,” the NDIA recommended.
Once internet is provided, residents need access to devices, and here nonprofits can step in. Institutions can repair or replace damaged devices, offer devices on loan, and establish solar-powered or generator-powered charging stations so people can recharge their devices during power outages and service disruptions.
Next, offer support through technology helplines to assist people with accessing critical online aid services. Include digital skills training during the recovery phase to help residents better navigate the many relief applications, telemedicine platforms, remote learning tools, and any other digital resources they will encounter. Be sure to offer assistance and trainings in English and in other languages spoken by the impacted communities.
Once residents have been trained in how to access digital relief resources, help ensure that these resources are actually Strike up partnerships with telehealth providers and offer portals that help to access and navigate often complicated Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding.
Finally, once the immediate recovery needs have passed, fight for subsidies that help low-income households reestablish or cover the cost of their internet service and ensure robust cybersecurity and data privacy protection. The chaos of recovery can sometimes be an opportunity for hackers and other bad actors, so it is important to educate people on possible scams or fraud.

The Data Center Issue

“All told, a mid-sized data center consumes around 300,000 of water a day, or about as much as 1,000 US households.”The risk of losing internet connectivity isn’t just restricted to the residents of geographically vulnerable areas. The locations of data centers, which host the servers and other hardware needed to power the internet and the services we access through it, are typically determined chiefly based on cost, not disaster resiliency. If a major data center is taken out by a natural disaster, dysconnectivity will ripple far beyond the data center’s physical location.

The overarching problem is that a digitized world requires many such data centers, which use massive amounts of water to keep them cool—contributing significantly to the very climate disasters to which they’re increasingly vulnerable.

“That reliance on water poses a growing risk to data centers, as computing needs skyrocket at the same time that climate change exacerbates drought. About 20 percent of data centers in the United States already rely on watersheds that are under moderate to high stress from drought and other factors,” NPR reported in 2022.

“All told, a mid-sized data center consumes around 300,000 of water a day, or about as much as 1,000 US households,” Arman Shehabi of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told NPR.

Rethinking Our Relationship to the Internet

Continuing down the path of a deeply digitized dependency simply isn’t going to work. As Ben Tarnoff wrote in The Guardian in 2019, “It’s clear that confronting the climate crisis will require something more radical than just making data greener. That’s why we should put another tactic on the table: making less data.”

“We should reject the assumption that our built environment must become one big computer.”

What if, instead of focusing solely on getting poor and rural areas better connected to the internet, we started questioning the need to digitize everything in the first place when it comes to disaster recovery and resiliency? Perhaps the remote and rural locations “left out” of internet connectivity could be the places that revolutionize our relationship to the internet and other large-scale data-based services—services that fuel climate change by their very functioning.

“We should reject the assumption that our built environment must become one big computer,” wrote Tarnoff. “We should erect barriers against the spread of [digital] ‘smartness’ into all of the spaces of our lives.”