Investigating the Built Environment’s Resilience and Sustainability Paradox

This systematic literature review examines the growing relationship between resilience and sustainability within the built environment, specifically how climate change-induced hazards affect building and infrastructure performance requirements. To find conceptual similarities, differences, and complementarities between the two paradigms, the review integrates results from peer-reviewed research. The latest research indicates that even highly sustainable buildings may still be vulnerable to climate extremes, such as floods, heatwaves, earthquakes, and heavy rainfall, despite sustainability frameworks historically prioritizing reductions in environmental impacts, including carbon emissions, resource consumption, and waste. This review utilized the SPAR-4-SLR framework to analyze a total of 83 peer-reviewed publications. The findings suggest that resilience is concerned with a system’s ability to absorb, adjust, and recover from disruptions, whereas sustainability is mainly linked with long-term environmental impacts. Significantly, the literature shows a growing trend toward integrated S+R models, in which resilience parameters like structural robustness, redundancy, flexibility, and adaptive capacity are added to sustainability strategies. The review indicates that integrating comprehensive frameworks that equally handle environmental performance and hazard resistance is necessary to achieve climate-proof built environments. The paper contributes by identifying and integrating these two concepts, which improves the long-term sustainability of buildings and infrastructure while also ensuring long-term reliability.