An Approach to Operationalise Resiliency towards Sustainable Futures

There is abundant discourse on resilience and sustainability, however, the ongoing challenge remains how to operationalize resiliency towards achieving the inextricably interwoven (i) precepts of circular economy, with (ii) the imperatives of sustainability, and (iii) the human-centered ideals of the era of Society 5.0. Consequent upon increasing concerns for unprecedented and adverse effects of climate change, paradoxically, a significant proportion of extant literature and discourse on resiliency tends to focus on the vulnerabilities of commercial, environmental, governance, industrial and societal systems to stressors inherent within natural hazards. Unwittingly, the convention emphasizes protection from the unprecedented effects of climate change stressors, even though global, national, physical, regional and sectoral delineations of these systems are also susceptible to other volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and complex (VUCA) stressors arising from the interactions and tensions between commercial, governance, industrial and societal endeavour. The content of this paper includes discourse on the classification of VUCA events into four domains, as well as the description of a generic, logically consistent, and coherent framework for operationalizing resiliency towards sustainable futures.