Sustainability and Resilience

In this week’s reading, Charles Redman discusses whether sustainability and resilience, which have started to become interchangeable terms, should be combined or remain distinct. Whilst it has become commonplace for researchers to want to combine Sustainability science and resilience theory, Redman argues that although he at first had the same inclination, “fundamental assumptions within each approach differed and even contradicted each other” (Redman 2012).

Redman’s  purpose in making this argument is that by treating resilience and sustainability separately, the distinctiveness of these approaches may be built upon and then we can focus on how their shared objectives may be achieved. Redman likens resilience and sustainability to adaptation and transformation. While resilience is the “capacity of a system to experience shocks while retaining function, structure, feedback capabilities, and therefore identity”, sustainability science seeks to address the “major challenges facing society” while ensuring the wellbeing of humans and the planet (Redman 2012).

Whilst Redman argues for the separation of these approaches and many other academics argue for their combination, I see two distinct terms that not only have significant overlap but which are dependent on each other. While sustainability is an approach to present day challenges without compromising the needs of the future, resilience is the response after the challenge, the urban environment’s inherent ability to bounce back. Whilst these two things can exist as completely separate characteristics, they are unlikely to. A sustainable response to a city responding to crisis would not only be to rebuild itself but to rebuild itself to resist the effects of a repetition of that crisis in the future – to meet the needs of the future generation. Therefore, while maybe not essential, a sustainable city is likely to be, should be, resilient. What about a resilient city? Well, a city that can comfortably bounce back from a crisis is a city that can support itself and its people for the long-term and should therefore be sustainable. But hold up. While this meets our most basic definition of ‘sustainability’ it doesn’t necessarily satisfy the triple-bottom-line ‘sustainability approach’. A resilient city which supports the economy and health and society to bounce back after crisis, cannot be sustainable if it has completely destroyed the environment in the process.

This discussion of resilience vs sustainability reminded me of the self-recycling video I wrote about in my post the other day and a website I discovered shortly after this: http://newplasticseconomy.org/

The New Plastics Economy is a movement driven by the environmental impacts of plastic disposal from the traditional linear economy of make à take à dispose towards a new “circular economy” in which plastics are reused over and over again. Whilst this idea is born out of the ‘sustainability approach’ to tackle a current issue, it has ramifications on the resilience of the plastics economy. Say the raw resource suddenly ran out. The current linear plastics economy would not be able to bounce back from this. It relies on raw material input to keep the system going. The circular system on the other hand, is a more resilient one in which a component (raw material) could be taken out and the system would continue to operate. Say New Plastic Economy’s resolution to the plastic problem was self-recycling as seen in the video from my last post. This system which touches on some sustainability factors such as lower energy emissions but does not satisfy others in its decreased efficiency, is even more resilient as it has a multitude of individual operations functioning so no matter which one is disrupted, it will not affect the continued functioning of any other machine or the system as a whole.  

Source: Redman, C 2012, ‘Should sustainability and resilience be combined or remain distinct pursuits?’, Ecology & Society, vol. 19 no. 2, DOI: 10.5751/ES-06390-190237, pp. 398-405.

Source: Ellen Macarthur Foundation 2016, The New Plastics Economy, accessed 15 April 2016, <http://newplasticseconomy.org/>.