Assessing sustainability, resilience, and security triad of urban systems under climate change risks: A wholistic perspective

Climate change and its impacts pose significant challenges and risks to humanity and sustainable development efforts. Recent unprecedented disasters attributed to climate change, compounded by the aftermath of COVID-19 and increasing geopolitical conflicts, have highlighted the need to re-envision development plans to ensure resilience and security while striving for sustainability. This paper presents a generic, quantitative, and holistic framework to evaluate the performance across the Resilience, Sustainability, and Security (RSS) Triad for different system scales under climate change hazards. The framework provides a detailed calculation process to quantify performance and derive indices for each aspect. Moreover, it accommodates climate change hazards, whether shocks or stresses. The framework also facilitates the incorporation of decision-makers' preferences through weighting factors, which can also support sensitivity analysis. Furthermore, it enables designers and planners to evaluate development options and allows decision-makers to make informed decisions and design more efficient and feasible development strategies that can withstand a changing climate.