The Temporality of Disaster: Data, the Emergency, and Climate Change

Climate change threatens to destabilise existing humanitarian temporalities, particularly the idea of ‘building back better’. Building back better, which involves reducing vulnerability to future harm, depends on our being able to predict, to at least some extent, what the future will be like. Climate change, destabilises our predictive abilities and thus limits our ability to adequately respond to future risk. In response, there is an increased humanitarian emphasis on resilience, adaptive capacity, and self-survival. At the same time, the data tools used by humanitarian actors to manage environmental risk focus attention on the present moment, rather than understanding the historical drivers of risk or invigorating new imaginings of the future. Thus climate change and humanitarian digital data tools reinforce a focus on an always unfolding present with implications for ways we might reimagine the future. If humanitarians involved in disaster recovery want to be more than emergency technicians in a world of worsening and increasing need, they have to reimagine the world, their role in it, and the temporal resister(s) with which they engage.