Sustainability and resilience

Abstract

Sustainability originates from the Latin; Sustinere, to hold, maintain support and endure. Resilience also originates form the Latin; Resilire, rebounding and bouncing back. The concept of sustainable development emerged as an important political vision and rose to prominence in the late 1980s. In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development referred to Sustainable Development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. In this period, the construction industry began to generate the first sustainable building assessment systems addressing environmental, economic and social aspects for buildings through their life cycles. Resilience is the ability to withstand and recover rapidly from disruptive events and has been considered to directly depend on the ability of the built environment to maintain and support the functions upon which modern society relies. Resilience is usually related to the occurrence of extreme events and disasters during the life cycle of structures and infrastructures. In the last decade it has been used to minimize specifically direct and indirect losses from hazards through enhanced resistance and robustness to extreme events, as well as more effective recovery strategies. Therefore, in general sustainability is usually defined through the triple bottom line of environmental, social and economic system considerations, while resilience is usually viewed as the ability of a system to be prepared to absorb impacts and recover and adapt following persistent stress or a disruptive event.