Bridging resilience and sustainability - decision analysis for design and management of infrastructure systems

The paper proposes a novel decision analysis framework and corresponding probabilistic systems representations allowing for the consistent and integral quantification of systems resilience and sustainability. This facilitates – to the knowledge of the authors, for the first time – that decisions relating to the governance of socio-ecologic-technical systems may be optimized with due consideration of their impacts at both local and short-term time scales as well as on global and long-term time scales. The resilience performance of the interlinked system is modeled through the formulation of resilience failure events which occur if one or more of the capacities of the interlinked system are exhausted. Sustainability failure is analogously introduced as the event that one or more of the Planetary Boundaries are exceeded. A principal example shows there is a trade-off between resilience, generation of benefits, consumption of materials, and emissions to the environment. Resilience provides benefits to society but at the same time imposes material consumption and emissions to the environment. Systems can, however, be designed such that resource consumption and associated environmental impacts are reduced and the resilience performance is increased simultaneously. The example further illustrates that social governance system failure may follow from inadequate design and governance of infrastructure.