ABSTRACT

Over the last 1–2 decades significant research and development efforts have attempted to address the challenge of managing risks due to system failures and possible cascading failures across systems through the concept of resilience, aiming to minimize risks associated with service disturbances and disruptions by means of an integral consideration of governance and technological measures. Whereas sustainability addresses decision making for the management of human activities on the Earth system with derived consequences to welfare, resilience may be seen to address decision making for the management the Earth system and human activities on the functionalities of social institutions and activities that facilitate welfare. It is evident that there is a strong coupling between sustainability and resilience, and that the two terms ultimately express the same mechanisms from two different perspectives. The present chapter addresses resilience and sustainability, and their interdependencies, in the context of providing decision support for societal developments. Based on earlier works of the author, capacities of human and natural systems are introduced and modeled probabilistically as functions of decisions affecting societal developments. It is shown that resilience and sustainability of engineered systems may be approached in the exact same manner by introducing resilience and sustainability failures as the events that one or more capacities of considered systems are exhausted. If resilience of the global Earth systems is considered in the long term perspective, resilience failure is equivalent to sustainability failure. Moreover, resilience of engineered systems at smaller scales necessitate resilience (or sustainability) at global scale. Tradeoffs between resilience and sustainability exist and must be accounted for when deciding how resilient engineered systems and sustainable societal developments should be. More research on these tradeoffs must be achieved in the nearer future to facilitate timely and informed societal decision making.