Digital Frontlines: Innovation for Food and Water Resilience in Humanitarian Contexts

Background
This Research Topic examines how digital innovations in food and water systems can shift the paradigm from short-term crisis response to long-term resilience in fragile and conflict-affected settings. As climate shocks, conflict, and displacement increasingly intersect, the need for responsive and forward-looking tools is urgent. Advances in big data, analytics, and digital platforms have created new opportunities to strengthen humanitarian action. This collection seeks cross-sectoral insights on how data-driven platforms, early warning systems, and participatory technologies are being adapted to enhance both humanitarian effectiveness and systemic resilience. Our goal is to build an evidence base that bridges the humanitarian–development divide and guides faster, smarter, and more inclusive action for food and water security in crisis-affected regions.

Goals
Fragile and crisis-affected areas now host most of the world’s food-insecure populations. These regions face overlapping challenges: conflict, climate volatility, weak governance, and limited infrastructure. While digital tools for water monitoring, agricultural planning, and anticipatory action have rapidly evolved, they are rarely tailored to the complex realities of volatile settings. Even when adopted, their development processes, deployment conditions, and impacts remain under-documented. This gap leaves decision-makers without the evidence needed to scale effective solutions or avoid repeating past failures.
There is a critical opportunity to rethink how such tools can support both immediate relief and long-term systems resilience. When ethically designed and locally co-developed, digital innovations can help anticipate shocks, optimize resource use, and support inclusive, conflict-sensitive responses that lay the groundwork for lasting resilience.
Scope
We welcome original research articles, case studies, reviews, methodological papers, and perspectives that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

Co-design of digital food and water system tools in fragile or crisis settings;
Big data and remote sensing for anticipatory action and recovery;
Ethical and conflict-sensitive data practices in humanitarian contexts;
Inclusive digital governance and capacity strengthening (e.g., youth, women, displaced communities)
Operational integration of digital solutions in humanitarian coordination;
Pathways from digital innovation to long-term resilience and systems change;
Digital tools for climate-informed peacebuilding and crisis preparedness;
Use of digital twins, scenario planning, and systems modeling in humanitarian response;

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Peacebuilding, Early warning systems, Systems resilience, Crisis analytics, Humanitarian crises, Conflict, Fragile settings, Resilience, Innovation, Big data, Digital tools, Anticipatory actions, Water-Smart Systems, Co-Design

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.