Advancing sustainable development goals: embedding resilience assessment

Abstract

Accelerating challenges to cities and communities have triggered a growing interest in the assessment of resilience and sustainability of future developments. For this purpose, many countries have adopted the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for sustainable development goals (SDGs), in which resilience has been incorporated as a component of sustainability. However, the framework has been criticised for not undertaking a comprehensive evaluation of resilience. This study, in an analytical scheme, examines the extent to which the SDGs incorporate measurement of resilience. Here, the SDGs indicators have been compared with the most recent comprehensive baseline resilience framework (BRF) through three stages: (a) thematic coding of the SDGs and BRF indicators; (b) developing matrices of coding for each resilience dimension; and (c) evaluating resilience measurement in terms of coverage by the SDGs. Results showed that although the SDGs indicators have a high level of coverage for resilience measurement through all 17 goals, some aspects are nonetheless overlooked. In this study, by categorising the goals into five groups based on their coverage of each resilience dimension, a guideline is created, demonstrating the goals relevant to each resilience dimension. Furthermore, a systematic framework of resilience indicators is also proposed to integrate the overlooked aspects of resilience into the SDGs and the post-2030 agenda. The advanced SDGs can serve as a joint framework to measure resilience and sustainability.