Sustainability and resilience for transformation in the urban century

Elmqvist, Thomas; Andersson, Erik; Frantzeskaki, Niki; McPhearson, Timon; Olsson, Per; Gaffney, Owen; Takeuchi, Kazuhiko; Folke, Carl

doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0250-1

Cited by 753 publications

(465 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…This has extended the spatial scales across which water is imported into cities embedded in food and other consumption goods. Thus, system boundaries of UWSS sustainability are expanded across time, from local to global scales, and incorporate additional crosssector interactions [3,30,31]. Ecological and water footprints account for land and water (quantity and quality) requirements embedded in consumption goods [28,32,33] (figure 2, bottom layer).…”

Section: Disentangling Security Resilience and Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Traditionally, the primary objective of urban water supply systems is to provide supply service security [1,2]. Increasing shocks resulting from extreme events, such as floods and droughts, compel urban managers to strive for increased resilience [3,4]. However, under current ecologically unsustainable trends, trade-offs occur between security, resilience and sustainability goals, putting sustainable development [5] at stake and requiring adaptive responses [3,[6][7][8][9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Increasing shocks resulting from extreme events, such as floods and droughts, compel urban managers to strive for increased resilience [3,4]. However, under current ecologically unsustainable trends, trade-offs occur between security, resilience and sustainability goals, putting sustainable development [5] at stake and requiring adaptive responses [3,[6][7][8][9]. As international attention is being drawn to addressing the consequences of climate change and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [10], including sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11) and clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), the question arises how such societal goals can be reached without the unintended consequences of maladaptation [11,12] and without crossing planetary resource boundaries [13,14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the security, resilience, and sustainability (SRS) of urban systems are set as targets for policy and strategic management efforts [10,15], they remain the subject of on-going scientific debate and agreed-upon methods to measure their attainment are lacking [6,16,17]. For example, definitions relating to urban resilience and sustainability have been criticized as vague [3]. While sustainability is a normative and aspirational concept, resilience is inherently nonnormative and must be differentiated into desired and un-desired resilience [3,6,18,19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, definitions relating to urban resilience and sustainability have been criticized as vague [3]. While sustainability is a normative and aspirational concept, resilience is inherently nonnormative and must be differentiated into desired and un-desired resilience [3,6,18,19]. Resilience is desirable when it aligns with sustainability goals and should consider the cross-scale nature of sustainability, which reaches beyond local and regional scales, as well as its interconnectedness across different systems [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Balancing security, resilience, and sustainability of urban water supply systems in a desirable operating space

Krueger

Borchardt

Jawitz

et al. 2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

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The security, resilience, and sustainability of urban water supply systems (UWSS) are challenged by global change pressures, including climate and land use changes, rapid urbanization, and population growth. Building on prior work on UWSS security and resilience, we quantify the sustainability of UWSS based on the performance of local sustainable governance and the size of global water and ecological footprints. We develop a new framework that integrates security, resilience, and sustainability to investigate trade-offs between these three distinct and inter-related dimensions. Security refers to the level of services, resilience is the system's ability to respond to and recover from shocks, and sustainability refers to local and global impacts, and to the long-term viability of system services. Security and resilience are both relevant at local scale (city and surroundings), while for sustainability cross-scale and -sectoral feedbacks are important. We apply the new framework to seven cities selected from diverse hydro-climatic and socio-economic settings on four continents. We find that UWSS security, resilience, and local sustainability coevolve, while global sustainability correlates negatively with security. Approaching these interdependent goals requires governance strategies that balance the three dimensions within desirable and viable operating spaces. Cities outside these boundaries risk system failure in the short-term, due to lack of security and resilience, or face longterm consequences of unsustainable governance strategies. We discuss these risks in the context of poverty and rigidity traps. Our findings have strong implications for policy-making, strategic management, and for designing systems to operate sustainably at local and global scales.

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