Climate Adaptation and Natural Hazards · Webinar recording · November 5, 2026
Sustainability and Resilience: Managing the Interdependence
A systems approach for business and communities
When sustainability and resilience reinforce each other, how can organizations capture the combined value? When they conflict, how should decision-makers weigh the trade-offs against their mission, immediate needs, and long-term goals?
Chapters
- 00:00Welcome and Introduction3 min
- 02:44Sustainability and Resilience: The Relationship5 min
- 07:14ARISE and the Ten Essentials for Resilient Cities4 min
- 11:30Where Cities Are Strong and Vulnerable5 min
- 16:09Business Survival and Community Recovery10 min
- 25:48Rotterdam: Natural and Engineered Systems Together4 min
- 29:56Enterprise Resilience: Beyond Business Continuity8 min
- 38:02Adaptability and Sustainability Trade-offs8 min
- 45:55Audience Questions and Practical Implications17 min
Summary
Organizations often manage sustainability and resilience separately, which makes it easy to miss where the two goals reinforce each other and where they conflict. The speakers gave examples of both.
- Circular supply chains, which keep materials in use, help on both counts. Fiksel called circularity the most desirable practice.
- Nuclear power cuts carbon emissions, yet many people still do not want a plant nearby. Corn ethanol, in Fiksel’s words, is neither resilient nor sustainable.
- Just before the webinar, Williams had been on a call about helping fire authorities in Germany decide how much forest a community can keep without adding to its wildfire risk.
Fiksel and Williams spent the hour on how decision-makers can tell the two cases apart and weigh the difference.
Williams, co-chair of ARISE-US, draws on more than a decade of city resilience scorecard work to show where communities prepare well and where they leave themselves exposed. He argues that a company’s plan to survive a disaster is also a plan for its community’s recovery, and uses Rotterdam to show natural systems and engineered infrastructure working as one.
Fiksel, author of Resilient by Design, takes the enterprise view. He separates the ability to bounce back from a disruption from the ability to anticipate change and adapt to it, then works through the trade-offs that show up in energy choices, inventory, and supply chains. His vulnerabilities-and-capabilities framework gives an organization a way to judge whether it is underinvested in resilience or spending more than its risks justify.
Seven key insights
Cities are tactically strong and strategically weak 11:30
Scorecard assessments show that cities rehearse emergency response well. They fall short on the work that reduces the need for a large response in the first place: governance, integrated planning with phone companies, internet providers, and electric utilities, making themselves financeable, keeping the community engaged over time, and deciding in advance how the local economy restarts after a disaster. Part of the planning gap is not of the cities’ making. Utilities, and often health systems and public health agencies, decline to join integrated planning.
Business continuity planning is community continuity planning 16:09
Businesses carry a community’s commerce, jobs, and tax revenue, and they depend on the community’s power, water, and workers. Williams adds a point many continuity plans miss: a hardened facility is of little use if employees have moved away because their homes were damaged.
Chronic stresses and acute disasters feed each other 16:54
Chronic stresses can predispose a city to disaster. Williams traced the Indus floods in Pakistan, roughly fifteen years ago, to deforestation in the Himalayan foothills hundreds of miles upstream, so a city depends on whoever manages the landscape around it, however far away. Chronic stresses also make a disaster’s impact worse, as Haiti has seen. The effect runs the other way as well. An acute disaster can trigger or deepen chronic stresses: New Orleans still has fewer residents than it did before Hurricane Katrina, and lower-income communities take longer to recover.
Natural and engineered systems work best together 25:48
Rotterdam combines porous pavement, environmental monitoring, and underground parking garages that hold stormwater and release it slowly after a flood. The port and shipping interests take part because the city’s flood resilience protects their operations and their workforce. The same logic produces real tensions elsewhere, such as how much forest cover a community can keep without adding wildfire risk.
Recovering is different from adapting 30:33
Fiksel distinguishes operational resilience, which restores normal functioning after a disruption, from strategic resilience, which anticipates change and adjusts capabilities and strategy. He calls adaptability the most important attribute of resilience, and notes that several of its building blocks, including organizational cohesion and access to information, cost little to strengthen.
Joseph teaches this framework in Energy Systems and Enterprise Resilience, his recorded course in the SSF Resilient Energy Certificate.
Resilience shows up in financial value 31:32
Fiksel walked through the economic value added formula most CFOs use. Resilient companies can grow revenue by standing out as reliable suppliers, avoid costly downtime, make the case for lower insurance costs, and lower their cost of capital by carrying less risk. Redundancy is the easy route to resilience, but spare equipment adds to the capital charge. He said a Dow Chemical business unit used his assessment method to cut inventory, close a warehouse, save about $200,000 a year, and present itself to customers as a more reliable supplier.
The business case for resilience investment is a core module of Energy Systems and Enterprise Resilience.
Trade-offs need explicit evaluation 38:34
Diesel backup keeps the lights on and pollutes. Lean production saves money and breaks under disruption, while inventory buffers cost money to carry. Fiksel’s approach weighs an organization’s vulnerabilities against its capabilities to find a zone of balanced resilience, which can mean investing more or, in some cases, less. In his closing remarks he urged companies to check whether their risk management and sustainability departments report to a common senior officer and have a real way to discuss how their concerns affect each other 60:34.
Where Fiksel and Williams agreed
Both speakers treat resilience as a property of whole systems. Williams closed by saying the built and natural environments have to be managed together, and business together with community 61:31. Fiksel opened from the same place, with a reminder that the environment nurtures us 02:55.
Both found the weakest links in how organizations are set up. Williams’s scorecard work shows cities practicing emergency response while governance lags, and utilities and health systems often stay out of integrated planning. Fiksel urged companies to check whether their risk management and sustainability teams report to a common senior officer and have a real way to talk to each other.
Both argued that the work has to happen before the disruption. Fiksel described turbulence, physical and social, as constant, and calls adaptability the most important attribute of resilience. Williams gave the municipal version: set prices in advance for the trucks, hauling and temporary housing a disaster will require, even if the contracts are renegotiated every year 58:12.
What governments and companies can do for each other 22:55
Governments can
- Share risk data and building codes
- Give businesses planning assumptions, such as no electricity for two weeks or no water for three days
- Negotiate bulk insurance contracts, including parametric policies
- Help build awareness among workers
Companies can
- Carry public messages to employees, who are also residents
- Lend analytic skills a small city may lack
- Support evacuation, volunteer programs, and post-disaster supplies
- Look after their own workforce, so people are still there the day after a disaster
The environment is shared work too. 24:49 Williams counts care of the environment and ecosystem services among the things businesses and governments have to manage together, as they do every other part of disaster risk reduction. House builders, agricultural interests, and foresters can add to environmental damage, and businesses depend on the ecosystem services that make their communities more resilient.
What is parametric insurance? 28:10 Williams explained it in response to a question. Conventional insurance sends a loss adjuster after a disaster to assess the damage and decide what to pay. A parametric policy pays out automatically when an agreed, measurable trigger is crossed. His illustrations: more than six inches of rain in 12 hours, or an earthquake above magnitude 5.0 within 50 miles. The idea began in crop insurance. Because nobody has to assess the damage, it can pay within three or four days and keep cash flowing to households and businesses. The trade-off is that the payout may not cover the full loss, though Williams noted that conventional policies increasingly fall short as well.
From the discussion
“The first duty of a business in a disaster is to survive. … Business continuity planning is community continuity planning. They are effectively one and the same thing.”
Peter Williams · 16:09
“The most important attribute of resilience is adaptability. … It is the capacity to understand and sense change and adapt to it.”
Joseph Fiksel · 38:02
“It’s not the built environment or the natural environment. It’s both. It’s not business separate from community. It’s both interwoven. And until you understand those two things, you’re not going to get much further.”
Peter Williams · 61:31
Questions from the audience
- Where a company’s own teams disagree about risk 47:21
- In Fiksel’s self-assessments, cross-functional teams rated the company’s vulnerabilities and capabilities. Marketing teams tended to see few weaknesses. Supply chain teams saw many, because they know the risks their suppliers carry.
- Mapping cascading failures without handing attackers a map 49:49
- Cities rarely know how their critical assets depend on one another, for example a cell tower that links a water plant that supplies a hospital. Assembling those failure chains is necessary, and the result has to be handled as sensitive security information.
- Does the business-community link hold for nonprofits? 52:01
- Yes. A nonprofit that cannot operate stops paying people, and the community takes the same economic hit.
- Co-investing in shared resilience, such as a community microgrid 52:56
- Williams points to property development as a working model of public-private collaboration, and to full accounting of avoided losses and insurance costs as what changes the investment case.
- Guarding against disaster capitalism 57:14
- Contract in advance, at a set price, for what will be scarce after a disaster: trucks, hauling capacity, temporary housing. Renegotiate the price each year if needed.
Short clips
How Rotterdam absorbs a flood
Williams on porous pavement, garages that hold stormwater, and pairing engineered and natural systems.
Operational versus strategic resilience
Fiksel on the difference between bouncing back and bouncing forward.
Cascading failures in city infrastructure
Williams on why cities need to map how critical assets depend on each other, and why that map is sensitive.
Slides and references
- Presentation slides (PDF)Fiksel and Williams, as presented November 5, 2026. 34 slides, 6.5 MB.
- Navigating the Sustainability-Resilience NexusJ. Fiksel, D. Johnson, J. Katz, and P. Williams, ARISE. The publication the speakers reference in their closing remarks, including US EPA system dynamics modeling for Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.
- The Ten Essentials for Making Cities ResilientUNDRR Making Cities Resilient 2030. The framework behind the ARISE scorecard work Williams describes.
- Disaster Resilience Scorecard for CitiesUNDRR. The self-assessment tool built on the Ten Essentials.
- Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030UNDRR. The international agreement on disaster risk reduction that Fiksel cites alongside the SDGs and the Paris Agreement.
The panel
Joseph Fiksel, Ph.D.
Professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, where he co-founded the Center for Resilience, a former vice president at Battelle, and author of Resilient by Design. SSF Resilient Energy Certificate faculty. He looks beyond business continuity to where sustainability and resilience reinforce or conflict with each other, and how companies can find opportunities to create value.
Peter Williams
Co-chair of ARISE-US, the U.S. network of a global private-sector alliance focused on disaster risk reduction, and an IBM Distinguished Engineer (retired). He draws on the UN framework for assessing city disaster resilience to show how cities identify risks and how businesses and communities can collaborate on resilience and recovery.
Edward Saltzberg, Ph.D.
Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum. For five decades he has helped businesses and public agencies weigh security risks against the economic and environmental costs of protection.
Co-hosted with ARISE-US
ARISE-US is the United States network of ARISE, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Private Sector Alliance for Disaster Resilient Societies. Its members, from companies, universities and nonprofits, work on resilient infrastructure and disaster-resilient investment, including the city scorecard work Peter Williams describes in this webinar.
SSF Resilient Energy Certificate · Course 2 of 7
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