From Disaster Resilience to Sustainability: Finding the Path
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Hazards and Sustainability".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 March 2021) | Viewed by 9952
Special Issue Editors
Interests: disaster resilience; food security; nutrition; higher education in development
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The sustainability of life- and livelihood-sustaining systems is under a global threat of catastrophic disaster and potential collapse from environmental change and resource consumption that overshoots planetary boundaries. These real and escalating risks of anthropogenic origin are increasingly manifested as hazards/shocks and stresses that negatively impact the wellbeing of locally adapted socio-technonatures and disrupt context-sensitive coupled human–environmental systems. At the same time, the emerging interest by scholars and practitioners in disaster resilience has remained largely stovepiped in pseudodisciplinary areas/communities of practice. Applied disaster resilience study intended for local action, policy, and planning often favors investigating more micro/mesoissues of “resilience of what” and “resilience of whom”. Even though resilience theory and sustainability science overlap around issues of land and resource management, lack of coherence can arise when, for example, the intentions of a disaster risk reduction policy may contradict the practicality of community mobilization or risk communication fundamental to building disaster resilience. It is necessary to further develop a synthetic dialogue and cross-fertilization of research approaches that emphasize cross-scale understanding of the geospatial and temporal dimensions of risk and resilience. Moreover, the contribution of multiscale and multishock exposure to vulnerability and resilience is poorly understood.
This Special Issue is dedicated to applying a multi- and transdisciplinary lens of system dynamics to the problem of disaster resilience as a key component of sustainability, with a particular focus on research and scholarship that has policy and program relevance. This Special Issue emphasizes the need to consider environmental, social, demographic, economic, and psychological determinants of disaster resilience. It also stresses the importance of understanding resilience as a problem of geospatial and temporal scales and cross-scale dynamics. Papers are specifically invited that make use of panel data, longitudinal series, or case studies to either elucidate the relationship between resilience and sustainability or to investigate the effectiveness of resilience-strengthening efforts on multidimensional social and ecological outcomes. Manuscripts that address costs and equitable financing of disaster resilience will be particularly policy-relevant. To address the purposes of this Special Issue, we seek a diversity of perspectives (e.g., social learning, action research, and adaptive management) and subjects that improve the understanding of shock resilience and the associated dynamics. Diversity of investigation scale is welcome when it has implications for scalable and sustainable change.
This Special Issue on disaster resilience and sustainability is forward-looking, intending to identify synergies for a new program of research to address the escalating risks that negatively impact our life-sustaining systems and the wellbeing of those that depend on them. Taken as a whole, the papers should improve the understanding of information flows and feedbacks at the foundation of capacities to adapt and transform in the face of change. They should also provide information concerning improved measures of sustainability-related resilience and how they can be better communicated for action-oriented decision-making. This requires a current stock-taking on recent advances and methodological challenges to research disaster resilience. Although the scope and aims of the Special Issue are broad, the purpose is laser-focused on the urgent need for increased dialogue and rationality between disciplines seeking a sustainable and resilient future.
Prof. Dr. Nancy Beth Mock
Prof. Nathan Morrow
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- Disaster resilience
- Hazards
- Vulnerability
- Cross-scale interactions
- Risk reduction
- Adaptation
- Transformative capacities
- Resilience capacities
- System dynamics modeling
- Systems thinking
- Global environmental change
- Social justice, participation, and conflict
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