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Sustainability is commonly assessed along environmental, societal, economic and technological dimensions. A crucial aspect of sustainability is that inter-generational equality must be ensured. This requires that sustainability is attained in the here and now as well as into the future. Therefore, what is perceived as ‘sustainable’ changes as a function of societal opinion and technological and scientific progress. A concept that describes the ability of systems to change is adaptive capacity. Literature suggests that the ability of systems to adapt is an integral part of sustainable development. This paper demonstrates that indicators measuring adaptive capacity are underrepresented in current urban water sustainability studies. Furthermore, it is discussed under which sustainability dimensions adaptive capacity indicators are lacking and why. Of the > 90 indicators analysed, only nine are adaptive capacity indicators, of which six are socio-cultural, two technological, one economical and none environmental. This infrequent use of adaptive capacity indicators in sustainability assessments led to the conclusion that the challenge of dynamic and uncertain urban water systems is, with the exception of the socio-cultural dimension, not yet sufficiently reflected in the application of urban water sustainability indicators. This raises concerns about the progress towards urban water systems that can transform as a response variation and change. Therefore, research should focus on developing methods and indicators that can define, evaluate and quantify adaptive capacity under the economic, environmental and technical dimension of sustainability. Furthermore, it should be evaluated whether sustainability frameworks that focus on the control processes of urban water systems are more suitable for measuring adaptive capacity, than the assessments along environmental, economic, socio-cultural and technological dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to verify a theoretical representation of the multidimensional concept of territorial risk, through a study of Italian provinces. The concept is referred to the exposure of the territorial system to the risk of an exogenous event, as a combination of factors of fragility and resilience. In the proposed framework, elements of the organization of a territorial system had been identified, in its economic, social and environmental dimensions, mostly affecting his exposure to the adverse impact generated by a disturbing event and the ability to answer and to regenerate. According to this scheme of representation, the territorial risk is the result of the combination of these factors that influence the probability of a local system to undergo negative changes as a result of the occurrence of the event. The evaluation of vulnerability and resilience of a system, by adopting a holistic reading of the phenomenon, involves the identification of systemic components and attributes such as openness to the external environment, structural diversification, availability of resources, structural dependence/independence, functional redundancy, adaptability strategy. In the paper the authors propose the construction of an indicator system and composite indices for monitoring, through multivariate statistical techniques, the factors of fragility and ability to recovery. The proposed system is applied to a study of the economic, social and environmental vulnerability and resilience of the Italian provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]