Resilience and sustainability: Similarities and differences in environmental management applications

Quality and risk management frameworks for biosolids: An assessment of current international practice

Biosolids, a product of wastewater treatment, provide a valuable resource, but to optimize the use of this resource it is necessary to manage risks posed to public health and the environment. Key requirements include identifying contaminant sources and providing barriers to ensure containment and treatment while maintaining the viability and value of biosolids products. Responsibility for managing biosolids is the remit of many stakeholders but primarily it rests with private and public wastewater facilities. The global variabilities in the way biosolids resources are acknowledged, applied, and managed are substantial. For example, some countries are increasing incineration because of their ability to remove contaminants while others have experienced a proportional decrease in incineration dependent on industrial resources or regarding resource recovery costs and needs. Some jurisdictions focus on energy recovery and others on land application. A risk management framework is a tool that may provide a suitable holistic approach to biosolids management. With this focus, current instruments in practice globally to manage biosolids were assessed for the degree to which they have adopted a risk management framework. To form a basis for this assessment a set of criteria was established by concept mapping several internationally recognized standards. Guidelines for a range of developed and developing countries were then assessed against these criteria. That process enabled the identification of which current practices were holistic in terms of applying biosolids risk management principles from production to end-use. Through this process, risk management gaps and vulnerabilities were identified. The results reveal that the incorporation of risk standards into risk management frameworks around the world is variable for the presence of risk criteria and the scale of detail provided. Contaminant concentrations need perspective within the changing risk landscape for stakeholders and the environment while jointly the opportunities and contaminant challenges require solutions that balance risks.

Taming the wicked problem of climate change with "virtuous challenges": An integrated management heuristic

Climate change is widely regarded as a "wicked problem" due to its complexity, interconnectedness, and the numerous stakeholders involved in finding a solution. The wickedness of climate change is further compounded by effects which are often nonlinear and uncertain, making it difficult to predict and manage its impacts. This paper builds on the growing body of knowledge on wicked problems by proposing an integrated heuristic that facilitates management in diverse economic and sociopolitical contexts by capturing the origins and dynamics of contemporary global socioenvironmental wicked problems and their potential resolution. The heuristic can also serve as the basis for a holistic wicked problem macro-theory. It is recognised that wicked problems such as climate change amplify into crisis states due to poverty and rigidity traps embedded within a system panarchy, which impede effective action for adaptation and mitigation. The concept of the "virtuous challenge" is embedded within the heuristic as a vital link in governance to enable effective leadership in the management of contemporary wicked problems through focused incremental transformation and a shift to an "agrowth" imperative. It is acknowledged that collaboration between stakeholders in the Global North and Global South is necessary for successful responses to virtuous challenges.

Assessing resilience of sustainability to climate change in China's cities

Achieving sustainability and coping with climate change are the greatest challenges to human survival and harmonious human-nature relationship. However, there is a lack of research on quantifying the resilience of sustainability to climate change over space and time. Here, a quantification method was developed to evaluate resilient performance of sustainability (includes economic, social, and environmental sub-resilient performance and resilient performance index) to climate change, and performed the first demonstration in China's 280 cities. It was found that resilient performance index of China's sustainability to climate change improved from 2005 to 2017, especially in Southwest China, but 6.8 % of cities showed a decreasing trend. With the improvement of the resilient performance index, the synergy degree among economic, social, and environmental sub-resilient performance scores increased. Economic development and sustainability improvement related to a higher but more disparity of the resilient performance index. This study encourages researchers and policymakers worldwide to focus on resilience of sustainability to climate change to help achieve sustained development and prosperity under climate change.

Toward sustainability and resilience in Chilean cities: Lessons and recommendations for air, water, and soil issues

Achieving sustainability and resilience depends on the conciliation of environmental, social, and economic issues integrated into a long-term perspective to ensure communities flourish. Many nations are transitioning toward both objectives, while at the same time addressing structural concerns that have not allowed them to look after the environment in the past. Chile is one of these nations dealing with such challenges within a particular administrative context, an increasing environmental awareness, and a set of unique and complex geophysical boundaries that impose a plethora of hazards for cities, ecosystems, and human health. This paper presents recent accomplishments and gaps, mostly from an environmental perspective, on issues related to air pollution, the urban water cycle, and soil contamination, in the path being followed by Chile toward urban sustainability and resilience. The focus is on the bonds between cities and their geophysical context, as well as the relationships between environmental issues, the built environment, and public health. The description and diagnosis are illustrated using two cities as case studies, Temuco and Copiapó, whose socioeconomic, geographical, and environmental attributes differ considerably. Particulate matter pollution produced by the residential sector, drinking water availability, wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and soil contamination from the mining industry are discussed for these cities. Overall, the case studies highlight how tackling these issues requires coordinated actions in multiple areas, including regulatory, information, and financial incentive measures. Finally, the policy analysis discusses frameworks and opportunities for Chilean cities, which may be of interest when conceiving transitional paths toward sustainability and resilience for other cities elsewhere.

Harnessing Insights from Indicators-Based Resilience Assessment for Enhancing Sustainability in the Gurage Socio-Ecological Production Landscape of Ethiopia

Even though the mosaic of different land-use/land-cover types has long contributed to the resilience of socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes in Ethiopia, recent data indicate that their sustainability is under threat. This study aims to evaluate landscape resilience by adopting a set of indicators for enhancing sustainability in the Gurage socio-ecological production landscape in Ethiopia. The authors employed a toolkit of indicators in the production landscape through a community-based scoring approach (1-5 Likert scale). The information from household surveys, land-use/land-cover analysis, and satellite-based drought incidents assessment was integrated with the ranking analysis to support the evaluations. The results revealed that landscape diversity, ecosystem protection, local governance, and social equity indicators had the highest landscape resilience ranks. In contrast, lower ranks are associated with knowledge, innovation, livelihoods, and well-being indicators. The overall resilience of the Gurage socio-ecological production landscape was estimated to be below average. Thus, strategies that enhance the resilience and sustainability of this socio-ecological landscape are essential. The findings could help draw the attention of policymakers and natural resource managers to building and strengthening the resilience of the landscape. This study demonstrates that indicators could aid in evaluating landscape resilience status along with other ancillary information, particularly in data-sparse regions. Methods of assessing resilience must be creative in such regions, and this paper may inform such efforts. In addition, the study recommends that landscape resilience indicators be improved by reducing subjective matter and including spatial-explicit dimensions for evaluating resilience.

Measuring economic crises impact transitioning to a circular economy

Increasing global concern about climate change and the circular economy have successfully established itselves in international and national policies over the last decade, with the aim of reshaping the production and consumer behavior. The circular economy is one of the core pillars of European Union policy and its success depends on the energy efficiency, reducing production costs, and maintaining employment levels by ensuring continuous strong economic independency of the region. While crises are unavoidable and continue to appear, this paper aims to project the impact of any crisis on sustainability transitions using data analysis of the Global Financial crisis from 2008 to 2009 and discuss how the success of the circular economy implementation and environmental policies could be affected. The paper notes that the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 had a short-term positive impact on environmental degradation and that economic interests overshadowed environmental goals. Due to the recent events of the ongoing Russia and Ukraine war, COVID-19 societal and industrial behavior has shifted from sustainable to linear and has taken a step backward in reducing environmental pollution and achieving Sustainable Development Goals. Analysis of already present data and the context of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, reviewing of COVID-19 impact on the global economy, health sector, and environmental policies allows us to predict the consequences, as it relates to the future of circular economy policy.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1007/s10668-023-03367-x).

Modeling the resilience of urban mobility when exposed to the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative system dynamics approach

In December 2019, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was detected in Wuhan, China. Due to the rapid spread of the disease, containment measures were adopted, which caused unprecedent shifts in individual mobility. Although some studies explored the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel patterns and resilience of transport systems based on different analysis techniques, there is a lack of studies addressing the impacts of the pandemic on the sustainability and resilience of urban mobility systems using in-depth and holistic methods, such as system dynamics. This research aims to characterize the dynamics present in urban mobility systems when exposed to pandemics and analyze the changes needed for systems to increase their resilience to pandemics using qualitative system dynamics modeling. The framework comprises the characterization of cause-and-effect relationships and the creation of systems' causal loop diagrams (CLD) in their basic state of functionality, when affected by pandemics, and still operating owing to its resilience. Our findings indicated that the CLD of a resilient system is driven by strategic preparedness and response plans, as well as research and development, which balance the spread of the pandemic and increase support on technological strengths and the activities performed from home.

Developing and Applying an Urban Resilience Index for the Evaluation of Declining Areas: A Case Study of South Korea's Urban Regeneration Sites

This study attempts to identify the direction of urban regeneration projects in declining areas by using the concept of urban resilience to cope with climate change and disaster. To this end, urban resilience was classified into a Green Resilient Infrastructure (GRI) and an Interactive Safety System (ISS), through a review of previous studies, and categorized into vulnerability, adaptability, and transformability. A total of 12 detailed indicators were derived and indexed using Euclidean distance. Using the indicators, three Korean urban regeneration targets, in Daegu, Mokpo, and Seosan, were selected to evaluate resilience before and after the urban regeneration plan. Consequently, the postplanning resilience index improved in all three target sites, compared to before the regeneration plan. Additionally, previously the regeneration plan showed lower index values in comparison to places not designated as urban regeneration areas. These results suggest that urban resilience needs to be considered in future urban regeneration projects, and that resilience indicators can be used as a means to set the direction of urban regeneration projects. To improve the overall resilience of a region, these indices can help local government establish a reference point for urban resilience in its region.

Managing tensions in resilience development: a paradox theory perspective on the role of digital transformation

Purpose

The study aims to identify the central paradoxical tensions existing in developing resilience in organisations. The main thrust of this study is to develop a thorough understanding of diverse conflicting tensions in building resilience and develop the possible strategies to surmount these tensions.

Design/methodology/approach

Using the case study approach, the study applied theory-elaboration strategy as this study is based on well-established literature from both digitalisation and resilience. The study uses the paradox theory lens in a case study to reconcile both theories with contextual idiosyncrasies.

Findings

The paradox theory lens provides perspectives to understand tensions during resilience development and the role of digital transformation in this process. It assesses the potential solutions for surmounting tensions in resilient operations. The mapping of workable solutions with different paradoxes and propositions has been proposed for future empirical research.

Research limitations/implications

The study suggests that practitioners should not consider resilience and sustainability as mutually exclusive; instead, managers must embrace ongoing tensions to bring solutions to address these two essential organisational priorities.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first empirical study that applies paradox theory to understand how an organisation can build resilience while confronting several paradoxes. The study findings support that resilience practices can move in tandem with environmental sustainability goals rather than being usually mutually exclusive.

Survivability, resilience and sustainability of supply chains: The COVID-19 pandemic

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chains (SCs) have been exposed to their greatest disruption in recent memory. This unprecedented situation has given rise to the concept of SC survivability, which is based on the need to find a new temporary equilibrium allowing SCs to survive during extreme events. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the conceptualization of SC survivability by providing some basic foundations for this new concept. Our analysis shows that dealing with SC survivability requires a larger scale than those adopted for the analysis of SC resilience. To solve this issue, we propose a new framework called "Human Needs Supply chains". This framework shows the interdependencies between SCs, society, and the environment and enables a shift from the classical SC's product-profit view to a holistic view centred on the satisfaction of basic human needs. Another contribution of this research is to highlight the links between SC survivability, SC resilience, and SC sustainability. We show that the classical resilience capacities (i.e., absorptive, adaptive, and restorative) are not enough to deal with extraordinary and long-term disruptions such as COVID-19, and we propose an adaptation of the SC resilience concept to integrate a survivability capacity. Building resilience with a survivability capacity will allow SCs to stay alive in a temporary non-viable equilibrium of sustainability during a large disruption and to recover to a viable equilibrium at the end of the crisis.

Climate resilience and the human-water dynamics. The case of tomato production in Morocco

In Morocco, droughts are an increasing threat affecting water availability, agricultural production and producers' livelihoods. Moreover, water demand for irrigation has led to overexploitation of the groundwater table causing significant natural resource management challenges. The combination of groundwater changes and increasing drought risk raises concerns about the ability of agricultural producers to be resilient against drought. In this study, we describe the interactions of environmental and socioeconomic processes which influence farmers' livelihoods involved in tomato production in Morocco. Building on system dynamics modelling tools, we aim to improve the understanding of the long-term dynamic behavior of water management and to explore plausible policy scenarios necessary for sustainable and resilient water resource management and agricultural development. Our results show that tomato production is not yet severely impacted by droughts. However, droughts are accelerating the process of groundwater depletion, impacting farmers' livelihoods, by decreasing crop productivity and reducing farmer's revenue over a longer time period, especially since tomatoes are a high-value crop. Therefore, integrated and effective policies are presented as a set of measures for a systemic enhancement of resilience. We conclude that a more radical approach toward water resource conservation and upholding the most vulnerable producers has to be adopted in order to enhance a sustainable and inclusive resilience of the tomato production in Morocco.

Role of change leadership in attaining sustainable growth and curbing poverty: A case of Pakistan tourism industry

This study has proposed to apply change leadership as a vehicle forward for sustaining the growth of the tourism industry to eradicate poverty through the Pakistani tourism industry. Applying a mixed method approach, this article has attempted to uncover the role a change leader can play to help achieve the United Nations' sustainable development goals of poverty reduction. In this study, one of the authors interviewed stakeholders of the tourism industry to find out the major drivers of the industry and identify the leadership style that may prove to be effective in the said industry. In the next phase of the study, a survey method approach was used where different tourism companies and hotel chains were included for analysis. The study aimed to check employee's perception of change leadership and its impact on their resilience and ultimately the sustainable organization performance of companies' operationalizing in the sector with moderating impact of sustainable tourism attitude in times of a crisis. In total, 430 full-time workers in the tourism industry were contacted for a self-administered survey achieving a response rate of 83%. The findings of the study confirmed that in the presence of a change leader, the process of adaptation to sudden changing situations amidst financial crises, pandemic, and climatic change, becomes bearable and employees can cope with the work situations without pushing them to quit the industry. The study has a significant contribution toward a rapidly growing and focused industry, which can play a major role in the economy of any country leading toward job creation and poverty reduction.

Leaping Forwards, Bouncing Forwards, or Just Bouncing Back: Resilience in Environmental Public Agencies Through after the Austerity Decade

The resilience of public environmental agencies is an important but broadly under-researched discourse. This paper addresses this lacuna by drawing on a three-part typology of resilience from organizational studies and applying it to the English natural environment agency, Natural England, following a decade of public sector agency de-funding under the aegis of austerity. The research question was explored qualitatively through eleven semi-structured interviews with the senior management team of Natural England during the summer of 2020. The findings suggest that public agency multi-functionality equate to heterogenous resilience across agency functions; that generally agency resilience (as a function of capacities) is poor with consequences upon good governance; and that they are broadly poorly positioned for the aftermath of Covid-19. The findings speak directly to the regulatory and organizational literatures with public administration by evidencing the complex realities of understanding resiliencies in large multi-functional public environmental agencies.

How resilient are localities planning for climate change? An evaluation of 50 plans in the United States

Resilience has increasingly become the principal management priority and planning goal for cities, especially for climate change adaptation. Yet few studies have evaluated whether and how well resilience are integrated into climate change adaptation planning. In this study, we first conceptualized resilience as five key elements (i.e., system, collaboration, uncertainty, coping capacity, and adaptive capacity) and developed a coding protocol based on these key elements. We then used it to evaluate a sample of 50 climate change plans in the United States (US) that has a major adaptation component. We found that the concept of resilience has not been adequately embedded in US climate change plans and that the predominant notions of resilience has limited influence on how well plans integrate resilience. We also found that standalone adaptation plans outperform hybrid plans in addressing uncertainty and fostering systems thinking. Ultimately, major barriers exist in translating the concept of resilience into climate change planning practice. We further offer implications for cities to more effectively plan for climate resilience.

Vulnerable, Resilient, or Both? A Qualitative Study of Adaptation Resources and Behaviors to Heat Waves and Health Outcomes of Low-Income Residents of Urban Heat Islands

Little is known of how low-income residents of urban heat islands engage their knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and resources to mitigate the health impacts of heat waves. In this qualitative study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 40 adults in two such neighborhoods in Los Angeles California to explore their adaptation resources and behaviors, the impacts of heat waves on physical and mental health, and threat assessments of future heat waves. Eighty percent of participants received advanced warning of heat waves from television news and social media. The most common resource was air conditioning (AC) units or fans. However, one-third of participants lacked AC, and many of those with AC engaged in limited use due primarily to the high cost of electricity. Adaptation behaviors include staying hydrated, remaining indoors or going to cooler locations, reducing energy usage, and consuming certain foods and drinks. Most of the participants reported some physical or mental health problem or symptom during heat waves, suggesting vulnerability to heat waves. Almost all participants asserted that heat waves were likely to increase in frequency and intensity with adverse health effects for vulnerable populations. Despite limited resources, low-income residents of urban heat islands utilize a wide range of behaviors to minimize the severity of health impacts, suggesting they are both vulnerable and resilient to heat waves.

A Path Analysis Model of Self- vs. Educational-Context- Regulation as Combined Predictors of Well-Being in Spanish College Students

Previous literature has established the importance of personal and contextual factors in college students' trajectories. Following the Self- vs. External-Regulation Behavior Theory (2021) and the 3P Biggs Model, the present study aimed at analyzing a structural linear model that validates the joint effect of self-regulation, educational context, age, and gender (as personal and contextual presage variables) with other meta-abilities, such as coping strategies, resilience, and positivity (process variables), and specific well-being outcomes, such as flourishing and health (product variables). A sample of 1310 Spanish college students was analyzed, aged 17 to 25, and a cross-sectional study with an ex post facto design was performed. Association and structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed using SPSS software (v.26) and AMOS (v.23). Results show that individual and contextual factors have an important role in the acquisition of psychological competencies in young adults. Self-regulation was proven to be an important meta-ability that predicts personal well-being and behavioral health outcomes. Complementarily, educational context was shown to be an external predictor of other skills, such as problem-focused strategies, and positive outcomes such as flourishing and behavioral health. Practical implications and limitations are discussed.

Identifying the Importance of Disaster Resilience Dimensions across Different Countries Using the Delphi Method

The article proposes a framework establishing a disaster resilience index applicable worldwide that accounts for differences between countries in terms of development and in terms of the relevance of several resilience dimensions. To achieve this index, countries were clustered using an indicator that reflected their performance according to the Sustainable Development Goals. For each cluster of countries, a Delphi process was used to obtain scores for every resilience dimension and sub-dimension that were then transformed into weights that varied from cluster to cluster to reflect differences in sustainable development. The article discusses the methodology that led to the quantification of the weights according to the Delphi process, as well as its results. The results highlighted the anticipated differences between different groups of countries, but also reflected cluster-specific features that should be accounted for when analyzing disaster resilience. The article also discusses different applications and possible improvements of the proposed framework based on comments collected during the Delphi process.

Discussing the Role of ICT in Sustainable Disaster Management

This paper analyses the role of information and communications technology (ICT) in supporting the implementation of the actions to be undertaken by the various actors of the Quadruple Helix (science, policy, industry, and society) in case of a disaster through the lens of sustainable development. A two-step methodology consisting of an online forum discussion with experts from SSH and ICT fields and a desk analysis of sustainable development goals and ICT tools for disaster management has been adopted. A set of actions that Quadruple Helix actors should implement under the ten sustainable development goals related to disaster risk reduction is provided in the paper. The role of ICT in favouring the implementation of the actions for achieving the sustainable development goals is underlined.

An extended hybrid fuzzy multi-criteria decision model for sustainable and resilient supplier selection

The formalization and solution of supplier selection problems (SSPs) based on sustainable (economic, environmental, and social) indicators have become a fundamental tool to perform a strategic analysis of the whole supply chain process and maximize the competitive advantage of firms. Over the last decade, sustainability issues have been often considered in combination with resilient indexes leading to the study of sustainable-resilient supplier selection problems (SRSSPs). The current research on sustainable development, particularly concerned with the strong impact that the recent COVID-19 pandemic has had on supply chains, has been paying increasing attention to the resilience concept and its role within SSPs. This study proposes a hybrid fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method to solve SRSSPs. The fuzzy best-worst method is used first to determine the importance weights of the selection criteria. A combined grey relational analysis and the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is used next to evaluate the suppliers in a fuzzy environment. Triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) are used to express the weights of criteria and alternatives to account for the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent to subjective evaluations. However, the proposed method can be easily extended to other fuzzy settings depending on the uncertainty facing managers and decision-makers. A real-life application is presented to demonstrate the applicability and efficacy of the proposed model. Sixteen evaluation criteria are identified and classified as economic, environmental, social, or resilient. The results obtained through the case study show that "pollution control," "environmental management system," and "risk awareness" are the most influential criteria when studying SRSSPs related to the manufacturing industry. Finally, three different sensitivity analysis methods are applied to validate the robustness of the proposed framework, namely, changing the weights of the criteria, comparing the results with those of other common fuzzy MCDM methods, and changing the components of the principal decision matrix.

Academic flocking and global distress: Equitable south-north research partnering to promote quality education in diverse contexts and cultures

In this article we apply an Afrocentric Resilience Theory (relationship-resourced resilience) to the domain of education research partnerships. We posit academic flocking as an equitable research partnership approach aimed at developing education knowledge that responds to collective distress and supports collective quality education. We provide support for our supposition regarding academic flocking by overviewing the mutually beneficial development of an online, home-based learning resource with relevance in two transnational contexts and cultures, South Africa and the United States of America. Whereas the context of the argument is a COVID-19 related global need for evidence-based education resources, conceptually we draw on lenses of resilience and emancipatory, democratising methodology to make sense of academic flocking as a fundamental structure for research partnership equity and relevant education innovation. As such, academic flocking holds value as a transformative alternative for South-North researcher partnerships in generating useful, quality educational innovations to address critical needs.

Sub-Saharan Africa's international migration constrains its sustainable development under climate change

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is seen as a region of mass migration and population displacement caused by poverty, violent conflict, and environmental stress. However, empirical evidence is inconclusive regarding how SSA's international migration progressed and reacted during its march to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article attempts to study the patterns and determinants of SSA's international migration and the cause and effects on sustainable development by developing a Sustainability Index and regression models. We find that international migration was primarily intra-SSA to low-income but high-population-density countries. Along with increased sustainability scores, international migration declined, but emigration rose. Climate extremes tend to affect migration and emigration but not universally. Dry extremes propelled migration, whereas wet extremes had an adverse effect. Hot extremes had an increasing effect but were insignificant. SSA's international migration was driven by food insecurity, low life expectancy, political instability and violence, high economic growth, unemployment, and urbanisation rates. The probability of emigration was mainly driven by high fertility. SSA's international migration promoted asylum seeking to Europe with the diversification of origin countries and a motive for economic wellbeing. 1% more migration flow or 1% higher probability of emigration led to a 0.2% increase in asylum seekers from SSA to Europe. Large-scale international migration and recurrent emigration constrained SSA's sustainable development in political stability, food security, and health, requiring adequate governance and institutions for better migration management and planning towards the SDGs.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01116-z.

Creativity as a Key Constituent for Smart Specialization Strategies (S3), What Is in It for Peripheral Regions? Co-creating Sustainable and Resilient Tourism with Cultural and Creative Industries

Sustainable tourism is one of the key sectors in the South Baltic Sea Region (SBSR), which belongs to the role model for sustainability—the Baltic Sea Region (BSR). In this context, resilience, recovery and sustainability become key common threads calling for new approaches mitigating negative impacts, upscaling resilience capacity and boosting recovery in the post-pandemic era. The present work aims at revealing conceptual and practical pathways for policy makers and businesses in revitalizing sustainable tourism in the region by emphasizing cultural and creative industries (CCIs) as strong contributors to sustainable development and economic ecosystems, such as tourism. Tourism is also one of the key thematic areas of the smart specialization strategies (S3) in the SBSR. However, there is almost no link between CCIs’ potential for sustainable and resilient tourism and their contribution to the co-design and co-creation of S3. CCIs are rather absent agents in quadruple helix networks supporting S3 policy implementation. The literature on this topic is still premature, and represents a clear gap in knowledge. By virtue of these circumstances, the present research investigates how CCIs contribute and reveal new linkages between local assets, potential markets and societal challenges by engaging them as proven sustainable innovation and transition brokers in transnational quadruple helix partnerships following S3 policies in accordance with the sustainable development goals (SDGs), thus supporting sustainable and resilient tourism. Moreover, this paper aims at advocating for development of rural and peripheral regions, thus reducing the so-called “rural marginalization”. In addition, this paper also supports ongoing recent discussions on related vs. unrelated diversification policy within the S3 realm.

Imagining Resilient Courts: from COVID-19 to the Future of Canada's Court System

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged an array of democratic institutions in complex and unprecedented ways. Little academic work, however, has considered the pandemic's impact on Canada's courts. This article aims to partially fill that gap by exploring the Canadian court system's response to COVID-19 and the prospects for administering justice amid disasters, all through the lens of resilience. After taking a forensic look at how the court system has managed the challenges brought on by COVID-19, we argue that features of resilience such as self-organization, flexibility, learning, and reflexive planning can contribute to the administration of justice during future shocks. We propose that the business of judging during shocks can become more integral to the business as usual of court systems. Imagining such a resilient court can be a way to step from COVID-19 to the future of Canada's court system.

Working through Disaster Risk Management to Support Regional Food Resilience: A Case Study in North-Eastern Australia

As a consequence of disasters such as pandemics and severe weather events, Australian communities often face ‘food shortages’ resulting from the reduced availability of food and reduced access to available food. These food shortages can be acutely felt by vulnerable populations, comprising people in communities who are already dealing with social or economic disadvantages. Despite growing calls to ensure food access for everyone during and following disasters, efforts are still largely ad hoc, champion based and highly variable in their reliability and quality of supply. There is also a disconnect between disaster-related food relief and improving business continuity towards local economic resilience. This study sought to tackle these challenges by exploring how ‘local food access’ could be integrated within disaster management mechanisms, to support the most vulnerable and also contribute to local economic resilience. This paper discusses the findings of a study undertaken in Cairns, a north-eastern Australian regional authority, and involves a review of disaster management planning and policy artifacts, an online survey, and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders providing care and advocacy for vulnerable populations. Synthesizing the findings, we present a disaster-management-focused ‘Local Food Access Model’ that connects shorter food supply chains to improved disaster response, resilience and contingency-planning agendas. Applying this model to Cairns, we conclude the multiple benefits and immediate stakeholder readiness for a virtual (online) food resilience and contingency hub, to enable the connection of local food availability and access information within existing disaster management processes. The research method used, the model, and the case-specific findings provide government decision makers with a useful process, a local food-access schematic and a case study example to support immediate improvements in disaster resilience for vulnerable populations.

Simulation of transportation infrastructures resilience: a comprehensive review

Despite the increasing simulation methods used by the research of transportation infrastructure resilience in the past decade, a comprehensive review of these simulation methods is lacking. Thus, this paper conducted an in-depth review of the major simulation methods adopted by the existing transportation infrastructure resilience literature, which are Monte Carlo simulation, network-based simulation, numerical simulation, and agent-based modeling and simulation. The four simulation methods were reviewed from three perspectives, namely purposes of simulation, data demands, and modeling approaches. Finally, based on the review results, this paper proposed three directions for that the research may go towards in the future. This paper contributes to the current body of knowledge by reviewing the simulation methods adopted by the research of transportation infrastructure resilience. This paper is useful to the practice as well, as it provides practitioners with a holistic view of the practical application of transportation infrastructure resilience simulation, which can enhance their knowledge and skills in this regard.

A planetary boundaries perspective on the sustainability: resilience relationship in the Kenyan tea supply chain

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether agricultural supply chains (ASC) can be simultaneously sustainable and resilient to ecological disruptions, using the Planetary Boundaries theory. The nine different Planetary Boundaries i.e. climatic change, biodiversity loss, biogeochemical, ocean acidification, land use, freshwater availability, stratosphere ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosols and chemical pollution are examined in relation to ASC sustainability and resilience. Kenya's tea upstream supply chain sustainability and resilience from the ecological point of view is questioned. This study adopts a multi-case study analysis approach of nine producer organisations from Kenya's tea supply chain. The data from the in-depth semi-structured interviews and a focus group discussion are analysed using thematic analysis. The Kenyan tea supply chain producers are not aware of all the nine planetary boundaries, although these impact on their resilience practices. They are engaged in pursuing both sustainability and resilience practices. They implement mainly environmental practices in relation to sustainability, while only a few of them are implementing resilience practices. The sustainability and resilience concepts were found to be interrelated, but resilience does not improve at the same pace as sustainability. It is suggested that the relationship between sustainability and resilience is non-linear. Limitations and future research avenues are also provided.

Development of a Business Model Resilience Framework for Managers and Strategic Decision-makers

Following the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global economy and on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular, the concept of resilience has experienced a renaissance. As an organizational concept, business model resilience describes the extent to which an organization can maintain or quickly recover its value proposition despite unexpected current or future disruptions (Palzkill-Vorbeck 2018). Although research has been conducted in this area for decades, there is still a lack of a unified framework that brings together the findings from research and links them to organizational practice. The paper addresses this gap by developing a framework for business model resilience and demonstrating its practical relevance for organizational performance during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The framework includes 11 factors that characterize the resilience of an organization's business model. For managers and decision-makers, the framework is an opportunity to assess and improve the resilience of their organizations. For researchers, the framework is an important foundation for transferring the concept of business model resilience into organizational practice.

A Sustainability-Based Risk Assessment for P3 Projects Using a Simulation Approach

Integrating sustainability in the risk management process is an emergent problem, especially for efficient infrastructure delivery. For the case of complex projects like public–private partnerships (P3), traditional management practices offer a limited capacity to address long-ranging risk impacts on the social, economic, and environmental fabric within and around the project boundaries. Although P3 projects are objective-based contracts, present risk models rarely delineate risk impacts on focused project objectives. The relevant studies are very scarce creating a limited understanding of available approaches to conducting sustainability-based risk management for P3 projects. As risk and sustainability are two inherently subjective concepts with multiple interpretations, their combined assessment within a single framework demands a pragmatic approach. Therefore, the current study presents a model for conducting a sustainability-based risk assessment of P3 infrastructure projects through global data. Monte Carlo simulation is employed to further define the probabilistic risk ranges and risk ranks over relevant triple-bottom-line-based sustainability indicators for highway sector P3 projects. Findings are further demonstrated through two highway case studies and relevant mitigation strategies are also suggested. In the end, an implementation framework and future recommendations for the application of study findings on actual projects are also suggested. The study has useful implications for practitioners and researchers alike aiming for the delivery of sustainable complex projects.

Resilience Dividends and Resilience Windfalls: Narratives That Tie Disaster Resilience Co-Benefits to Long-Term Sustainability

The need for increased disaster resilience planning, especially at the community level, as well as the need to address sustainability are clear; these dual objectives have been deemed national priorities in a number of recent US Executive Orders. Major global climate agreements, (i.e., the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, Paris Climate Agreement, and the Sustainable Development Goals) all emphasize the need to integrate disaster resilience and climate risks with continued sustainable development concerns. Current ways of assessing synergies and trade-offs across planning for disaster resilience and sustainability in investment projects that impact communities are limited. The driving research question in this paper is how researchers and practitioners may better express relative categories of co-benefits to meet this need. We draw upon the categorization of some co-benefits as contributing to the resilience dividend, which has helped communication across fields and created bridges from research to practical on-the-ground planning in recent years. Furthermore, we leverage the growing focus on the need to recognize the role of narratives in driving decisions about how and where to invest, which elucidates the inherent value of archetypes that resonate across stakeholders and disciplines to describe investments that may meet multiple objectives. We introduce the concept of a resilience windfall as an unexpected or sudden gain or advantage of resilience planning to be conceptualized alongside resilience dividends. We then assess the practicality of decerning resilience windfalls across various projects that have aspects of both resilience and sustainability. We recount five narrative vignettes that demonstrate disaster resilience interventions and associated resilience dividends and windfalls. This effort highlights the importance of considering resilience dividends and resilience windfalls during the planning, execution, and evaluation phases of disaster resilience projects. These typologies provide an important contribution to the integration agenda between disaster resilience, climate risks, and sustainable development. There are policy implications of framing incentives for interventions that address both disaster resilience and long-term sustainability objectives as well as encouraging robust tracking of both resilience dividends and windfalls.

Assessing the Climate Resilience of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): A Metric-Based Approach

The impacts of climate change have resulted in the emergence of resilience as the de factor framework for countries seeking to capture the differential and uneven ability to prepare, react, respond and cope with volatile and rapid changes of climate-related stresses. Despite being considered by many researchers the most vulnerable region to the negative effects of climate change, the climate resilience of Sub-Saharan Africa has not been extensively studied. Using countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a study area, this paper constructed a pragmatically based resilience metric called the composite national climate resilience index (CNCRI) that can be used as a tool for the policy word. The inherent variables used to construct the CNCRI were justified and used to measure the resilience of countries in SSA based on five different dimensions. The result indicates that the CNCRI score, 1.05 (least resilient) to 44.8 (most resilient), and the island countries of Mauritius, Seychelles, and Cape Verde are comparatively more resilient than the rest of the countries in the study area. Regionally, Southern Africa is more resilient compared to East, West, and Central Africa. The vulnerability and readiness metric suggested that Cape Verde is the only country in SSA to have low vulnerability and high readiness, while most countries have high vulnerability and low readiness, making them the least resilient countries needing urgent mitigation and adaptation actions. Lastly, finding from this study could provide the policy world with insight for improving the overall ability to prepare and respond to the negative impacts of climate in the study area.

The Basse-Terre Island of Guadeloupe (Eastern Caribbean, France) and Its Volcanic-Hydrothermal Geodiversity: A Case Study of Challenges, Perspectives, and New Paradigms for Resilience and Sustainability on Volcanic Islands

The volcanic-hydrothermal geo-diversity of the Basse-Terre Island of Guadeloupe archipelago (Eastern Caribbean, France) is a major asset of the Caribbean bio-geoheritage. In this paper, we use Guadeloupe as a representative of many small island developing states (SIDS), to show that the volcanic-hydrothermal geodiversity is a major resource and strategic thread for resilience and sustainability. These latter are related to the specific richness of Guadeloupe’s volcanic-geothermal diversity, which is de facto inalienable even in the wake of climate change and natural risks that are responsible for this diversity, i.e., volcanic eruptions. We propose the interweaving the specificity of volcanic-geothermal diversity into planning initiatives for resilience and sustainability. Among these initiatives research and development programs focused on the knowledge of geodiversity, biodiversity and related resources and risks are central for the long-term management of the water resource, lato sensu. Such a management should include a comprehensive scientific observatory for the characterization, exploration, and sustainable exploitation of the volcanic-hydrothermal geodiversity alongside planning for and mitigating geophysical risks related to sudden volcanic-induced phenomena and long-term systemic drifts due to climate change. The results of this exercise for Guadeloupe could typify innovative paths for similar SIDS around their own volcanic-hydrothermal geodiversity.

Resilience: Directions for an Uncertain Future Following the COVID-19 Pandemic

The concept of resilience is multi-faceted. This commentary builds upon the analytical distinctions of resilience provided by Urquiza et al. (2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001508). In response to this article, we emphasize several distinctions between resilience and other systems concepts. These include distinctions between resilience, risk, and vulnerability, the tradeoff between resilience and efficiency, resilience contrasted with robustness, the relationship between resilience and sustainability, and finally methods for building resilience-by-design or resilience-by-intervention. Improving understanding of these concepts will enable planners to select resilience strategies that best support their system goals. We use examples from the 2020-2021 coronavirus pandemic to illustrate the concepts and the juxtapositions between them.

A framework linking farming resilience with productivity: empirical validation from Poland in times of crises

Farming sectors' resilience has been built over decades with the aid of policies and institutions. However, its actual standing can be assessed in times of crises when farms have to overcome particular challenges. We use a large-scale farming sectors dataset FADN spanning 2006-2015 in which two major economic crises occurred-the global economic crisis of 2008 and the Russian embargo of 2014-to exemplify our approach to resilience's assessment based on the Polish farming sectors. We introduce a distinction between "potential resilience" versus "revealed resilience" where the former is assessed based on resilience capacities (robustness, adaptability and transformability), while the latter is assessed based on the observed decomposition of total factor productivity (TFP) changes in response to the adverse economic shocks. Hence, the proposed framework directly links productivity with the two types of resilience. We applied the Färe-Primont method of TFP decomposition, into technological change and various types of efficiency changes and a detailed farm survey to distinguish between the drivers of technological changes in each farming sector such as specific innovations and ecosystem services. Our findings show that farms differ in their revealed resilience both among the sectors and between two different shock events. Only field crop farms and granivores farms (pig and poultry) maintained their resilience to both crises, staying robust and/or adaptable. The former had the most productive technology and were leaders in applying innovations while the latter were second best in innovations and fairly good in their application of ecosystem-based services into their technology. Other farm types failed to be resilient to the first crisis but proved robust during the second. The outcomes of the study have implications for sustainability oriented policies.

Development and Assessment of a Web-Based National Spatial Data Infrastructure for Nature-Based Solutions and Their Social, Hydrological, Ecological, and Environmental Co-Benefits

Comprehensive datasets for nature-based solutions (NBS), and their diverse relationships have not yet been accumulated into a deployable format. This research describes the development of a novel National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) system for NBS co-benefits throughout the contiguous United States. Here, we gather and integrate robust geospatial datasets from the social, ecological, environmental, and hydrologic domains using seamless, cloud-based data services to facilitate the trans-disciplinary assessment of NBSs as a function of society and Earth. This research enhances practical decision making and research by assimilating web-based datasets and describing the missing links between national policy and robust adoption of NBSs as a sustainability solution. This NSDI serves to foster participatory planning capabilities and integrate local sustainability goals into decision–support frameworks. Such a platform strengthens the knowledge base necessary for addressing multiple, co-evolving issues of societal relevance, an essential component of fully espousing NBSs within the realm of socio-technological systems and improving policies and implementation regarding sustainable solutions. The efficacy of the proposed platform to serve as a holistic data information system is assessed by exploring important characteristics associated with geospatial NSDI tools, namely, openness, spatial functionality, scalability, and standardization. By placing GIS strengths and weaknesses in the context of transdisciplinary NBSs, we reveal strategic directions toward further co-production of such NSDIs. We conclude with recommendations for facilitating a shared vision of transdisciplinary technologies to strengthen the amalgamation of broad co-benefits and multi-disciplinary influences in sustainability planning.

Study on the Relations of Supply Chain Digitization, Flexibility and Sustainable Development—A Moderated Multiple Mediation Model

In the face of an external environment featuring a high level of risk, multiple changes, and high uncertainty, the supply chain’s emergency replenishment, collaborative management, regulation of organic commodity, and low-cost rapid response will promote its’ sustainable growth and development, which is necessary for today’s economic development. The digitization and flexibility of the supply chain are of great value in obtaining the sustainable development of the supply chain. When dealing with an uncertain environment and market risk, current supply chain flexibility not only functions through its internal organizational flexibility, but also through collaborative creation and an extended supply chain network which will proactively form a replenishment supply sub-chain driven by the need for change responsiveness. This article constructs an associated model consisting of digitization, supply chain flexibility, and sustainability using an empirical analysis method to explore the implicit correlation of these factors. The analysis results of the mediating effect model show that both digitization and flexibility have significant positive effects on the sustainable development of the supply chain. Collaborative knowledge creation and supply chain flexibility play multiple mediating roles while market uncertainty positively moderates the impact of supply chain flexibility on supply chain sustainable development.

Sometimes, green is the outcome: climate action in records management and archives in Canada

Purpose

The paper aims to respond to three questions: Are Canadian organizations committed to sustainability? Are there any links between sustainability and records management and archives programs? And, to what extent are records managers, archivists and technologists engaged in climate action? The paper also provides background on climate change in the Canadian and global contexts, defines relevant terminology, and presents a literature review that positions sustainability, adaptation and mitigation in relation to records management and archives.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper is based on qualitative participatory research involving expert interviews in 24 government agencies, universities and businesses located in 10 Canadian cities.

Findings

The organizations in the study are committed to sustainability and have developed significant programs and activities in support of this aim. Although the records managers, archivists and technologists interviewed are involved in related activities, there is a gap between what they are doing as a matter of course and the wider sustainability efforts of their parent organizations. As resources are tight, sustainability measurement entails more work and there are no real incentives to add sustainability components to programs, the participants are focused on delivering the programs they are hired to do. As a result, there is a sense of serendipity around outcomes that do occur – “sometimes, green is the outcome”.

Research limitations/implications

This paper presents the results of research conducted at 24 organizations in 10 Canadian cities, a small but meaningful sample that provides a springboard for considering climate action in records and archives. Based on the discussion, there is a need for a records and archives agenda that directly responds the United Nation's climate action targets: strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters; integrating climate change measures into policies, strategies and planning; and improving education, awareness-raising and human institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning. In support of this aim, the paper charts possible material topics from the literature and compares these with research findings.

Practical implications

From a top-down perspective, organizations need to expand sustainability programs to address all business areas, including records and archives. From a bottom-up perspective, records managers and archivists should include adaptation in disaster planning and consider the program benefits of developing economic, environmental and social sustainability initiatives to mitigate climate change.

Originality/value

The paper defines resilience, sustainability, adaption and mitigation and positions these terms in records management and archives. The paper examines how records managers, archivists and technologists think about sustainability; where sustainability intersects with records and archives work; and how records managers and archivists can engage in climate action.

Empathic Design in Engineering Education and Practice: An Approach for Achieving Inclusive and Effective Community Resilience

In this paper, we argue that an inclusive and effective community resilience approach requires empathy as a missing component in the current engineering education and practice. An inclusive and effective community resilience approach needs to be human-centric, individual- and communal-sensitive, justice-oriented, and values-based consistent. In this paper, we argue that three kinds of empathy, namely cognitive, affective, and conative, play a central role in creating and sustaining an inclusive and effective approach to community resilience. Finally, we discuss empathetic education through learning theories and analytics skills to cultivate empathy in engineering education. Cultivating empathy in engineering education could help advance the impact and contribution of engineering to well-being.

A Scientometric Review of Urban Disaster Resilience Research

Natural disasters and human-made disasters are threatening urban areas globally. The resilience capacity of the urban system plays an important role in disaster risk response and recovery. Strengthening urban disaster resilience is also fundamental to ensuring sustainable development. Various practices and research for enhancing urban disaster resilience have been carried out worldwide but are yet to be reviewed. Accordingly, this paper gives a scientometric review of urban disaster resilience research by using CiteSpace. The time span (January 2001–January 2021) was selected and divided into three phases based on the number of publications. In addition, according to keyword statistics and clustering results, the collected articles are grouped into four hotspot topics: disaster risk reduction, specific disaster resilience research, resilience assessment, and combination research. The results show that most of the existing research is in the first two categories, and articles in the second and fourth categories both show a high growth rate and could be further research directions. The review indicates that urban disaster resilience is essential for a city’s sustainable development. Moreover, the findings provide scholars a full picture of the existing urban disaster resilience research which can help them identify promising research directions. The findings can also help urban government officials and policymakers review current urban disaster management strategies and make further improvements.

Resilience-Enhancing Solution to Mitigate Risk for Sustainable Supply Chain—An Empirical Study of Elevator Manufacturing

As the complexity of supply chains increases, the enhancement of resilience for mitigating sustainable disruption risks in supply chains is an important issue. Quality function deployment (QFD) has been successfully applied in many domains to solve multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problems. However, research on developing two houses of quality to connect sustainable supply chain disruption risks, resilience capacities, and resilience-enhancing features in elevator manufacturing supply chains by using the MCDM approach is lacking. This study aims to develop a framework for exploring useful decision-making by integrating the MCDM approach and QFD. By applying the framework, supply chain resilience can be improved by identifying the major sustainable risks and the key resilience to mitigate these risks. Important managerial insights and practical implications are obtained from the framework implementation in a case study of the elevator manufacturing industry. To strengthen resilience and thus mitigate key risks, the most urgent tasks are to connect the working site and the backstage to enhance product development and design and to share real-time job information. When these features are strengthened, agility, capacity, and visibility can be improved. Finally, unexpected events lead to changes in supplier delivery dates, and factors such as typhoon and lack of critical capacities/skilled employees with the greatest impact can be alleviated. This framework will provide an effective and pragmatic approach for constructing sustainable supply chain risk resilience in the elevator manufacturing industry.

Thriving, Not Just Surviving in Changing Times: How Sustainability, Agility and Digitalization Intertwine with Organizational Resilience

Nowadays, the buzzwords for organizations to be prepared for the competitive environment’s challenges are sustainability, digitalization, resilience and agility. However, despite the fact that these concepts have come into common use at the level of both scholars and practitioners, the nature of the relation between sustainability and resilience has not yet been sufficiently clarified. Above all, there is still no evidence of what factors determine greater resilience to change in an organization that also wants to be more sustainable, especially in times of crisis and discontinuity. This research aims to explore from a theoretical point of view, through the construction of a conceptual model, how these dimensions interact to help the business to become strategically resilient by leveraging digitization and agility as enablers. A new view of resilience arises from the study, which goes beyond the well-known ability to absorb or adapt to adversity, to also include a strategic attribute that could help companies capture change-related opportunities to design new ways of doing business under stress. A key set of strategically agile processes, enabled by digitalization, creates strategic resilience that also includes a proactive, opportunity-focused attitude in the face of change. Strategic resilience to lead to organizational sustainability must be understood as a multi-domain concept quite similar to the holistic view of sustainability: environment, economy and society. Finally, the research offers a set of propositions and a theoretical framework that can be empirically validated.

Co-Producing Knowledge Innovation through Thematic Incubators for Disaster Risk Reduction and Sustainable Development in India

The private sector for long has been looked upon as a funding source to cushion the disaster and climate change damages and losses. In recent times, there is a more proactive approach with the private sector increasingly engaging in activities to promote Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a part of their business strategies. Despite significant strides being made by the private sector in this regard, the strategies that are good for the business, environment, and sustainability are yet to take off at a large-scale. Many private organizations are still facing the challenge of identifying the right target sector and stakeholders for fulfilling their sustainability requirements. However, the greatest strength of the private sector is its ability to innovate. As part of this innovative design, the concept of thematic incubation for corporate sustainability is explored. The products and services developed through these thematic incubators are envisaged to result in the achievement of global development agendas and promotion of sustainability performance for multiple stakeholders including government, academia, private sector, and the community at large. This concept allows a win-win situation with the culmination of long-lasting social and environmental goals along-with achieving profit-with-purpose. The paper identifies the concept of sustainability with respect to the interest of the stakeholders, as well as its alignment with that of sustainable development and disaster risk reduction. The paper presents an exploratory case of the thematic incubation for disaster risk reduction, climate change, and sustainable development as a possible approach to corporate sustainability. The paper details the process of thematic incubation along with possible challenges and advantages of the same. In all, thematic incubation has been identified as a lynchpin to ensure the effective utilization of resources and setting in motion a culture of innovation, entrepreneurship, use of science, and sustainability at the local level.

The Need to Reconcile Concepts that Characterize Systems Facing Threats

Desirable system performance in the face of threats has been characterized by various management concepts. Through semistructured interviews with editors of journals in the fields of emergency response and systems management, a literature review, and professional judgment, we identified nine related and often interchangeably used system performance concepts: adaptability, agility, reliability, resilience, resistance, robustness, safety, security, and sustainability. A better understanding of these concepts will allow system planners to pursue management strategies best suited to their unique system dynamics and specific objectives of good performance. We analyze expert responses and review the linguistic definitions and mathematical framing of these concepts to understand their applications. We find a lack of consensus on their usage between interview subjects, but by using the mathematical framing to enrich the linguistic definitions, we formulate comparative visualizations and propose distinct definitions for the nine concepts. We present a conceptual framing to relate the concepts for management purposes.

Sustainability of the agri-food supply chain amidst the pandemic: Diversification, local input production, and consumer behavior

The COVID 19 pandemic was a two-edged sword; it exacerbated the already inefficient agri-food system but, in doing that, made us reflect, rethink possible and sustainable solutions to address SDG's 1, 2, 11, and 5. A lot has been written on the immediate effect of the pandemic on different crops/animals and nodes of the value chain. In this chapter, we look at the negative and positive effect of the pandemic on sustainability in the context of a dynamic agri-food chain focusing on areas of localized input supply and food system sustainability, diversification, and Resilience, and consumer behavior Surveys were carried out in May/June, 2020 to understand the effects of COVID 19 on the agri-food system in Southern, West, Central, and Eastern Africa and strategies to secure sustainable solutions and resulting policy implications. For this chapter, we reflect on the results from 10 countries from Southern and Eastern Africa.

Results show that farmers in Eastern Africa had a diverse portfolio of processed livestock products than those in Southern Africa. Secondly, most farmers in Eastern Africa had diverse processed products. Thus, product diversification created resilience capacities for dairy systems. Diversity in access to inputs also increased the resilience and sustainability of supplies during precarious periods. The findings also reveal that sustainable consumer behavior during pandemics goes beyond responsible consumption. Instead, consumers need to rethink and devise consumption models that alleviate the food consumption-related effects of the pandemics and increase the availability and consumption of alternative products with social, economic, health, and environmental impacts.

Mapping Potential Zones for Ecotourism Ecosystem Services as a Tool to Promote Landscape Resilience and Development in a Brazilian Municipality

In recent decades, with the increasing global need for sustainable development, ecotourism has emerged as one of the most efficient activities that can be used to reconcile economic development with environmental conservation. A growing interest in the ecotourism and ecosystem services provided by landscapes makes such services increasingly necessary within municipal planning processes. This study aims to construct a geoenvironmental model based on geographic information systems (GISs) to spatially identify areas with greater capacity to promote ecotourism, with a practical case study of the city of Brotas, Brazil. The model can produce an integrated analysis of landscape components using geoenvironmental, topographic, and urban data. As a result, four zones were classified according to their ecotourism potential, with 81% of the overall local territory showing great potential, which not only reinforces the territory’s resilience regarding sustainable development, but also demonstrates that ecotourism should be included in discussions related to environmental planning in Brotas, as well as in other municipalities that have ecotourism potential.

Sustainability Problematization and Modeling Opportunities

A sound theoretical ground is required for sustainability related concepts reconciliation and operationalization. The current study investigates the opportunities to conceive a homogenous sustainability model derived from theoretical ecology, using as a prototype the “organization” concept from the Chemical Organizations Theory (COT). A sustainability problematization and a literature examination try to capture and link some useful perspectives and sustainability connected concepts. Some of the most influential methods and tools are reviewed, in particular among those relating to the triple bottom line framework and to the ecological footprint family, together with concepts close to the core sustainability definition, like resilience and circularity. Theoretical ecology provides candidate goal functions based on self-organization gradients, such as fitness functions and thermodynamic orientors. The COT formalism provides a higher abstraction level and the algorithms for patterns identification in a reactions network. The sustainability problematization reveals the motifs of a possible model of “total ecosystem”, which subordinates the anthropic cultural (social–economic) system to the thermodynamic, chemical, biological, and cultural determinisms regulating biological and cultural species of an ecological network.

Mimicking nature for resilient resource and infrastructure network design

Increasingly prevalent extreme weather events have caused resilience to become an essential sustainable development component for resource and infrastructure networks. Existing resilience metrics require detailed knowledge of the system and potential disruptions, which is not available in the early design stage. The lack of quantitative tools to guide the early stages of design for resilience, forces engineers to rely on heuristics (use physical redundancy, localized capacity, etc.). This research asserts that the required quantitative guidelines can be developed using the architecting principles of biological ecosystems, which maintain a unique balance between pathway redundancy and efficiency, enabling them to be both productive under normal circumstances and survive disruptions. Ecologists quantify this network characteristic using the ecological fitness function. This paper presents the required reformulation required to enable the use of this metric in the design and analysis of resource and infrastructure networks with multiple distinct, but interdependent, interactions. The proposed framework is validated by comparing the resilience characteristics of two notional supply chain designs: one designed for minimum shipping cost and the other designed using the proposed bio-inspired framework. The results support using the proposed bio-inspired framework to guide designers in creating resilient and sustainable resource and infrastructure networks.