From Disaster Resilience to Sustainability: Finding the Path

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

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• 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