Illustrating integrated sustainability and resilience based assessments: a small-scale biodiesel project in Barbados

Abstract

Assessments today need to help reverse trends towards deeper unsustainability and address the unavoidable interconnections, feedbacks and uncertainties that typify complex socio-ecological systems at all scales. To illustrate one promising approach, this paper describes a modest effort to integrate understandings from Gibson et al's approach to sustainability assessment with the Resilience Alliance's applications of complex systems thinking into a suite of systems and sustainability based criteria. The integrated sustainability-resilience criteria were used to assess an existing small-scale biodiesel operation on Barbados that involves waste management, public health, transportation, energy security and community involvement considerations. The assessment revealed that the main benefit of this biodiesel project is in social learning rather than enhancing energy security and waste management, and the best ways of enhancing the project lie in larger scale policy initiatives. The findings suggest that the use of a sustainability-resilience approach can contribute insights unlikely to emerge from more narrowly focused assessments.