The concepts of resilience and sustainability may appear to be dueling frameworks for assessing system performance in the face of both natural and man-made hazards. However, the dependencies between resilience and sustainability and their mutual foundation in vulnerability and risk require a closer examination of how the two concepts contribute to community well-being. Growing awareness of these concepts and their relevance to community vitality has created a need to better understand these interrelationships, and how they can be integrated in assessing and achieving resilient and sustainable communities.
This presentation describes the results of a study to develop indicators of resilience and sustainability for communities to apply in assessing the status of existing resilience and sustainability practices as well as to evaluate the potential of candidate improvement strategies. A resilient community is defined as possessing physical, social and organizational characteristics that allow a community to: 1) withstand a performance disruption when a hazardous event occurs, 2) recover rapidly following such an event, or 3) transform in response to the event in order to provide an acceptable level of service over the life of the system. A sustainable community operates by achieving balance across availability and performance of critical resources (social, environmental, and economic) such that negative impacts to the environment are reduced while positive impacts to society and economy are maintained at an acceptable level, both now and in the future.
On the basis of a comprehensive literature review that generated several hundred prospective resilience and sustainability indicators, a subset of key indicators were defined and characterized according to several practical considerations (qualitative vs. quantitative, spatial and temporal scale, data collection and resource requirements, urban vs. rural applicability, etc.). As the study results are not prescriptive and are flexible with regard to the level of complexity and scale, it enables an individual community to customize a set of indicators for assessing and achieving community resilience and sustainability based on selecting those measures most appropriate for their circumstances.