An integrated and dynamic framework for assessing sustainable resilience in complex adaptive systems

Abstract

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.

Impact of Water Level Rise on Urban Infrastructures: Washington, DC, and Shanghai as Case Studies

“…The concepts of vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability that are frequently used to frame assessments related to system performance are interrelated. Nelson, Gillespie‐Marthaler, Baroud, Abkowitz, and Kosson () developed an integrated framework for assessing sustainable resilience in complex systems considering system vulnerabilities.…”

Selecting Indicators for Assessing Community Sustainable Resilience

“…Although the methods employed to identify and collect literature for the review are similar to those used by Parsons et al (2016), Cutter (2016), Sharifi (2016), and Asadzadeh et al (2017), they go beyond the concepts of disaster resilience to encompass a broader set of resources that include a more robust selection of indicators for natural systems, climate change, and economic resilience that is consistent with the concept of sustainable resilience. Recognizing that the number of indicators identified is too extensive to be very helpful, the results were organized into a classification structure that is related to the sustainable resilience assessment framework (Nelson et al, 2019), and consolidated to help users understand how indicators may be applied within the aforementioned framework.…”

“…Reviews of indicators for community resilience have been conducted in recent literature (Asadzadeh, Kötter, Salehi, & Birkmann, 2017;Cutter, 2016;Hosseini et al, 2016;Johansen et al, 2016;Koliou et al, 2018;Larkin et al, 2015;Lu & Stead, 2013;Sharifi, 2016), revealing an abundance of proposed indicators (Cutter, 2016;Sharifi, 2016). Resilience indicators are focused on enabling communities to assess how well they are able to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disaster (natural or manmade), and as such, should include the concepts of risk, vulnerability, sustainability, and adaptive capacity (Gillespie-Marthaler et al, 2018;Nelson et al, 2019). However, many indicator sets are poorly balanced in terms of representing critical facets and distribution of social, economic, and environmental capital needed to maintain a community.…”

“…Recognizing the need for consolidation of indicators (and metrics) within a consistent structure that facilitates identification and selection for use in assessment processes, we have developed a classification scheme and organizational structure to support the budding concept of sustainable resilience (Gillespie-Marthaler, Nelson, Baroud, Kosson, & Abkowitz, 2018;Nelson, Gillespie-Marthaler, Baroud, Abkowitz, & Kosson, 2019). Sustainable resilience is defined as the ability to maintain desired system performance while simultaneously considering intrasystem and intergenerational distribution of impacts (resulting from vulnerability) and sustainability capital (availability of critical social, economic, and environmental resources).…”

“…Illustration of the assessment framework for sustainable resilience (modified fromNelson et al, 2019).…”