Sustainability and Resilience—A Practical Approach to Assessing Sustainability in Innovative Infrastructure Projects

A fast transformation towards coupled infrastructures is apparent across the sectors. Challenges of Climate Change (CC) mitigation and adaptation drive numerous innovations propelled by new technologies and interconnections enabled by information and communication technologies (ICT). The resilience of systems is challenged by an increasing frequency of weather extremes and the higher complexity of innovative systems. While sustainability generally gains importance in infrastructure planning, early planning phases offer a chance to guide the development of options toward more sustainability before fundamental decisions are taken. We define resilience as integral part of sustainability and propose a sustainability check for in-process sustainability assessment of local infrastructure innovation projects. In our contribution we focus on the resilience-part of the assessment framework. To assess resilience, we differentiate system properties describing structure, resources and abilities of the regarded system. We focus on the resilience of socio-eco-technical infrastructure systems at the local level to external disturbances such as climate change influenced weather extremes. As a reference for the sustainability check, an operational stability-oriented understanding of resilience (``bounce back'') based on ``engineering resilience'' is adopted. Bearing local level community resilience in mind, our work addresses mainly the operation and administration of local level infrastructure utilities engaged in short and middle term innovation processes as part of local sustainability transition. As our results indicate, the sustainability check can be used to mediate between different professional perspectives and it can provide a valuable and practical tool to support the sustainability assessment and planning of innovative infrastructure projects.