Sustainability and resilience: A review of definitions, relationships, and their integration into a combined building assessment framework

Every year, the United States is faced with billions of dollars in damages and large numbers of deaths due to natural hazards. Resilience to these hazards has become a growing theme in sustainable design and the current global discourse on climate change adaptation. Coping with the challenges of earth's ever-shifting climate contextualizes the importance of resilience in sustainable development. To achieve greater resilience at a minimum environmental cost, the literature suggests developing a coherent sustainability and resilience framework. This review discusses the definition of sustainability and resilience and the relationship between the two concepts in order to examine the possibility of establishing such a combined framework. Studying the relationship between the sustainability and resilience points to some similarities between the two paradigms but also highlights key differences that may impede their integration. Most existing studies advocate the incorporation of resilience indicators into sustainability metrics and believe it to be technically possible. The major finding of this review is that the integration process requires developing a new combined assessment tool or a thorough refinement of current sustainability frameworks to include resilience indicators that were not initially included. For such a unified framework to be established successfully, the active involvement of different stakeholders in all stages is necessary.