Resilience The Ultimate Sustainability

This pioneering book by a career industry insider and 9-11 survivor spotlights why the multi-trillion dollar US built environment is increasingly failing. His analysis exposes policies and interests that to this very day are the root causes of vulnerability. It discusses why the green movement has fallen short in addressing sustainable building development. The book extracts 30 lessons for nations aiming to build a more disaster-resilient future. Guaranteed to stir building, policy and sustainability circles, it signals a time for change.

In this timely book, Emilio Jose Garcia and Brenda Vale explore what sustainability and resilience might mean when applied to the built environment. Conceived as a primer for students and professionals, it defines what the terms sustainability and resilience mean and how they are related to each other and to the design of the built environment. After discussion of the origins of the terms, these definitions are then compared and applied to case studies, including Whitehill and Bordon, UK, Tianjin Eco-city, China, and San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina, which highlight the principles of both concepts. Essentially, the authors champion the case that sustainability in the built environment would benefit from a proper understanding of resilience.

Many of today's communities face an unprecedented struggle to adapt and maintain their environmental, economic, and social well-being in an era beleaguered by fiscal constraints, uncertainty about energy prices and supplies, rapid demographic shifts, and accelerated climate impacts. This step-by-step guidebook for urban planners and urban designers explains how to create and implement an actionable plan for making neighborhoods, communities, and regions more environmentally healthy, resource-conserving, and economically resilient. Sustainable and Resilient Communitiesdelineates measures for repairing, retrofitting, and transforming our built environments and supporting systems.

This book details a process of creating a long-term sustainability and resilience plan for local governments to use in designing and implementing sustainability and resilience-related policies, initiatives, and programs. It offers guidance and methods in applying sustainability and resilience strategies to attain the prosperity of organizations and communities. The recommendations in this book are based on the author's years of experience in directing applied resilience and sustainability planning for a local government, and years of research covering diverse aspects of sustainability and resilience from climate change, climate preparedness and readiness, quadruple bottom line strategy, greenhouse gas emission reduction policies, climate adaptation and mitigation to sustainable energy policies and initiatives. Chapter one defines terms related to sustainability and resilience and addresses how the topics reshape local governments and communities. Chapter two maps out the sustainability and resilience process for organizations and communities, determining the appropriate steps to be taken at each level of sustainability and resilience planning. Chapter three identifies community and organizational level engagement, with internal and external stakeholders, including designs necessary throughout these processes. Chapter four contains measuring, tracking, monitoring and reporting methods using the quadruple bottom line strategy, and developing a sustainability and resilience progress report to ensure accountability, transparency, and good governance. Then, chapter five details the implementation of a sustainability and resilience plan once it is established, describing potential programs and initiatives to achieve sustainable and resilient communities. Chapter six describes the intersection between sustainability and resilience, and chapter seven examines the tools and resources available to create a practical sustainability and resilience plan. Chapter eight concludes the text by addressing the future of sustainability and resilience, and complexities of the modern dynamics of the interconnected systems in cities, counties, and organizations, and recommends how local government administrators in their planning methods and strategies must consider these challenges.

The book examines management strategies for developing and implementing strategic resilience and sustainability plans for sustainable and climate-resilient communities and organizations. It examines trends in resilience and sustainability planning, highlighting best practices and case studies. The book explores Quadruple Bottom Line strategies and methods to implement resilience and sustainability-related initiatives in organizations and communities. It also examines diverse perspectives on climate resilience, climate preparedness and readiness, greenhouse gas emission reductions policies, climate adaptation and mitigation, disaster preparedness and readiness, and sustainable energy policies and projects. Additionally, the book offers insights on strategic resilience and sustainability planning during a pandemic as well as private sector perspectives on strategic resilience and sustainability. In chapter one, the author presents expanded definitions of strategic resilience and sustainability as well as mechanisms reshaping communities and organizations. Chapter two examines strategic planning processes for communities and organizations and lays out planning steps. Chapter three offers insights into community and organizational level engagement, looking at internal and external stakeholders, organizers, partners, collaborators, and implementers of distinct stages of strategic resilience and sustainability planning. Chapter four outlines measurements and tactics to track and improve strategic resilience and sustainability reporting mechanisms using the quadruple bottom line strategy. It offers a resilience progress report to ensure accountability, answerability, transparency, and good governance. Chapter five details the implementation of a strategic resilience and sustainability plan, describing programs and initiatives to achieve resilient and sustainable communities and organizations. Chapter six extensively examines the theoretical and practical intersection between climate change, resilience, and sustainability. Chapter seven reviews resources available for strategic resilience and sustainability plans to aid communities and organizations. Chapter eight assesses the current and future state of resilience and sustainability in communities and organizations, including concerns surrounding climate change, pandemics, disaster resilience, and emergency management and preparedness.

To best serve current and future generations, infrastructure needs to be resilient to the changing world while using limited resources in a sustainable manner. Research on and funding towards sustainability and resilience are growing rapidly, and significant research is being carried out at a number of institutions and centers worldwide. This handbook brings together current research on sustainable and resilient infrastructure and, in particular, stresses the fundamental nexus between sustainability and resilience. It aims to coalesce work from a large and diverse group of contributors across a wide range of disciplines including engineering, technology and informatics, urban planning, public policy, economics, and finance. Not only does it present a theoretical formulation of sustainability and resilience but it also demonstrates how these ideals can be realized in practice. This work will provide a reference text to students and scholars of a number of disciplines.

Resilience is a term that is gaining currency in conservation and sustainable development, though its meaning and value in this context is yet to be defined. Searching for Resilience in Sustainable Development examines ways in which resilience may be created within the web of ecological, socio-economic and cultural systems that make up the world in. The authors embark upon a learning journey exploring both robust and fragile systems and asking questions of groups and individuals actively involved in building or maintaining resilience. Through a series of wide ranging interviews the authors give voice to the many different approaches to thinking of and building resilience that may otherwise stay rooted in and confined by specific disciplinary, professional or spatial contexts. The book documents emerging trends, shifting tactics and future pathways for the conservation and sustainable development movement post Rio+20, arriving at a set of diverse but connected conclusions and questions in relation to the resilience of people and planet. This book is ideal for students and researchers working in the fields of conservation, sustainable development, education, systems thinking and development studies. It will also be of great interest to NGOs and government officers whose interests and responsibilities focus on conserving or reconstructing biodiversity and system resilience.

Complexity theory illuminates the many interactions between natural and social systems, providing a better understanding of the general principles that can help solve some of today's most pressing environmental issues. Complexity theory was developed from key ideas in economics, physics, biology, and the social sciences and contributes to important new concepts for approaching issues of environmental sustainability such as resilience, scaling, and networks. Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future is a hands-on treatment of this exciting new body of work and its applications, bridging the gap between theoretical and applied perspectives in the management of complex adaptive systems. Focusing primarily on natural resource management and community-based conservation, the book features contributions by leading scholars in the field, many of whom are among the leaders of the Resilience Alliance. Theoreticians will find a valuable synthesis of new ideas on resilience, sustainability, asymmetries, information processing, scaling, and networks. Managers and policymakers will benefit from the application of these ideas to practical approaches and empirical studies linked to social-ecological systems. Chapters present new twists on such existing approaches as scenario planning, scaling analyses, and adaptive management, and the book concludes with recommendations on how to manage natural resources, how to involve stakeholders in the dynamics of a system, and how to explain the difficult topic of scale. A vital reference for an emerging discipline, this volume provides a clearer understanding of the conditions required for systems self-organization, since the capacity of any system to self-organize is crucial for its sustainability over time.