Linking disaster resilience and sustainability

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.