Assessing the sustainability of a resilient built environment: Research challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Natural hazards foster the need for resilience in the built environment, but resilient structures must not interfere with sustainability. The potential trade-offs are increasingly being investigated using performance-based assessments combined with life cycle assessments (LCA) to translate probable building or bridge damage into environmental losses. Leveraging 102 publications intersecting sustainability and resilience in the built environment, this review sheds light on the current methodological challenges and opportunities for integrating natural hazard-induced damage with environmental losses in the built environment. The reviewed literature primarily focused on buildings exposed to seismic hazards, deriving their losses using the best-known LCA mode, attributional LCA. Building and bridge frameworks showed notable methodological distinctions, along with a near absence of consideration of the interactions between climate change and natural hazards or structural vulnerabilities. Based on the findings, 22 opportunities for future research were synthesized. Future research should seek to better assess the total life cycle sustainability of resilient structures by exploring advanced modes of LCA, widening the scope of their assessments, and better integrating uncertainty and sensitivity. Achieving a more sustainable and resilient built environment also requires upcoming research to investigate the practicalities of aligning modeling frameworks, tools, data, and case studies. Addressing these research gaps will assist in anticipating how the built environment can be adapted and shaped to positively contribute to a resilient and sustainable future.