Linking disaster resilience and sustainability

Abstract

Resilience and sustainability have both gained traction in civil engineering. There is significant overlap between both fields, but practitioners tend to remain confined to their niche. This paper clarifies the link between both fields, reflects on the underlying concepts, and identifies challenges and opportunities in understanding complex problems involving both resilience and sustainability. A conceptual framework is proposed for understanding resilience and sustainability together. The example of a coastal town subject to sea-level rise and large storms is used to motivate the framework. The example is used to evaluate the use of discount rates for events in the distant future. The results are discussed to determine our ability to decide whether such scenarios are sustainable. The conclusion is that computational approaches will be inadequate. Rather, there is a need for qualitative thinking that embraces ambiguity and unmeasurable uncertainty.

Urban Resilience Discourse Analysis: Towards a Multi-Level Approach to Cities

“…Through the qualitative analysis of these papers, we can reveal that papers considering adoption are mostly either about adoption of different sustainable practices, policies or systems in agriculture [55][56][57], or they address questions of implementation of different sustainability and resilience policies and standards [58]. Studies on disaster resilience often concern a community level from different perspectives: for example, in engineering context [59], from a tourism development [60] or water supply contexts [61]. Despite certain peculiarities such as units of analyses, most of these studies agree that resilience and sustainability have a hierarchical relationship, where resilience is a part of sustainability: it is said that resilience is a "foundation" for sustainability [60], resilience is a "requirement" for urban system sustainability [62], or resilience is a necessary condition for sustainability [59].…”

“…Studies on disaster resilience often concern a community level from different perspectives: for example, in engineering context [59], from a tourism development [60] or water supply contexts [61]. Despite certain peculiarities such as units of analyses, most of these studies agree that resilience and sustainability have a hierarchical relationship, where resilience is a part of sustainability: it is said that resilience is a "foundation" for sustainability [60], resilience is a "requirement" for urban system sustainability [62], or resilience is a necessary condition for sustainability [59]. However, going deeper, Marchese et al [36] identified three possible frameworks for sustainability and resilience: (1) resilience as a component of sustainability;…”

A Comparative Analysis of Coordination, Participation, and Training in Post-Disaster Shelter Projects

“…Foremost, we have identified post-disaster pathways to resilience and sustainability of infrastructure systems, answering calls to bring specificity to these outcomes [64][65][66]. Our adaptation of current resilience indicators from developed countries (e.g., [67]) and sustainability indicators from development contexts (e.g., [27]) provide a useful tool to replicate assessing both of these outcomes.…”

Performance-based probabilistic framework for seismic risk, resilience, and sustainability assessment of reinforced concrete structures

“…Structures constructed in hazard prone regions need to be resilient to fulfill sustainability objectives (Wen et al, 2019; Zheng et al, 2018). Resilience and sustainability have vast similarities and should be used in an integrated perspective (Bocchini et al, 2014; Rodriguez-Nikl, 2015). Frameworks for the resilience and sustainability have been developed (Marchese et al, 2018) and studies are available incorporating sustainability in hazard prone regions (Asprone and Manfredi, 2015; Gencturk et al, 2016).…”