Vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability are three concepts commonly used in assessing the quality of a variety of systems. While each can be applied independently when performing risk analysis, there is growing interest across multiple disciplines in understanding how these concepts can be integrated when considering complex adaptive systems, such as communities. In this paper, we identify issues related to the use of these respective concepts in assessing complex adaptive systems, and describe how these issues may produce imbalanced results and maladaptive outcomes. We identify five critical areas where alignment and integration across concepts can lead to improved system assessment.As a result, we introduce a new paradigm, sustainable resilience, in which these concepts are integrated to enable alignment of adaptation and transformation strategies with desired resilience outcomes. This work provides the foundation for the development of an integrated assessment framework to help guide informed risk-based decision making for sustainable and resilient systems.

Growing awareness of climate change and resulting impacts to communities have generated increasing interest in understanding relationships between vulnerability, resilience, sustainability, and adaptive capacity, and how these concepts can be combined to better assess the quality of complex adaptive systems over time.Previous work has described interactions between these concepts and the valueadded should they be integrated and applied in a strategic manner, resulting in a new understanding of system quality defined as sustainable resilience. However, a framework for explicitly integrating vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability assessment to develop understanding of system sustainable resilience has yet to be proposed. This paper presents a high-level, integrated and dynamic framework for assessing sustainable resilience for complex adaptive systems. We provide a set of functional definitions, a description of each step in the proposed assessment process, and walk through an example application of the framework, including a discussion of preliminary analyses, technical methodologies employed, and suggested future advances.

Communities are complex systems subject to a variety of hazards that can result in significant disruption to critical functions. Community resilience assessment is rapidly gaining popularity as a means to help communities better prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruption. Sustainable resilience, a recently developed concept, requires communities to assess system‐wide capability to maintain desired performance levels while simultaneously evaluating impacts to resilience due to changes in hazards and vulnerability over extended periods of time. To enable assessment of community sustainable resilience, we review current literature, consolidate available indicators and metrics, and develop a classification scheme and organizational structure to aid in identification, selection, and application of indicators within a dynamic assessment framework. A nonduplicative set of community sustainable resilience indicators and metrics is provided that can be tailored to a community's needs, thereby enhancing the ability to operationalize the assessment process.

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