Abstract
Urbanization is a major driver of land use change and global environmental decline. With accelerated urbanization worldwide, it is essential to put in place new policies to conserve urban ecosystems, species and the services these provide in order to secure more sustainable, resilient and livable cities for the 21st century. In urban planning, the concept of resilience has broadly replaced the word sustainability. In recent years, resilience indicators have been gradually developed, but few address urban resilience from a social-ecological systems perspective. We develop a methodological framework to measure urban resilience, define an urban resilience index and apply it to Spanish province capitals as a case study. Results show that most Spanish province capitals are far from being resilient. We conclude that increased efforts to measure urban resilience should be in place, and we offer the urban resilience index as a theoretical framework for measuring resilience in urban social-ecological systems that can be gradually improved as more data become available.
Highlights
Resilience has become a key concept underpinning the sciences concerned with sustainability [1,2,3,4], having gone as far as replacing the word sustainability in everyday discourses [2,3]
National and international level, resilience has even become a priority in urban planning, having been included as a main objective in local strategies for climate change adaptation [8] or in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations Development Programme [10]
Despite important progress in recent years, the existing methodologies to measure urban resilience only analyze it for specific disturbances or specific urban services from an engineering or ecological perspective
Summary
Resilience has become a key concept underpinning the sciences concerned with sustainability [1,2,3,4], having gone as far as replacing the word sustainability in everyday discourses [2,3]. National and international level, resilience has even become a priority in urban planning, having been included as a main objective in local strategies for climate change adaptation [8] or in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations Development Programme [10]. Taking into account that humans are the major drivers of environmental change [13], it is a priority to introduce new paradigms in urban planning, to create more habitable, sustainable and resilient cities, and to reduce their environmental and social impacts across the whole planet. There is not a consensus about what resilience means for urban areas [9] and how we can introduce resilience in urban planning [14]
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