Beyond Sustainability: ICR 2026 Explores Resilience Thinking

International Conference on Resilience (ICR 2026)

Vadodara (Gujarat) [India], January 6: For decades, sustainability has guided how institutions, cities, and communities approach growth, development, and responsibility. Rooted in long-term balance and conservation, sustainability has shaped policies and practices across sectors. However, as societies face increasingly frequent disruptions—ranging from climate extremes and economic volatility to digital vulnerabilities and social uncertainty—another framework is gaining urgency: resilience.

Unlike sustainability, which plans for stability over time, resilience responds directly to disruption. It is concerned with the capacity of systems to absorb stress, adapt in real time, and reorganise without losing their core purpose. In today’s world of overlapping environmental, economic, digital, and social challenges, resilience has emerged as a more immediate and action-oriented way of thinking.

It is within this evolving context that Navrachana University positions its International Conference on Resilience (ICR 2026)—not as a conventional academic gathering, but as a timely response to conditions that cities, institutions, and societies are actively navigating.

This urgency is reflected in the scale of academic engagement with ICR 2026. The conference has received over 175 research abstracts from universities, research institutions, industry organisations, and independent practitioners across India and abroad. This response highlights a clear shift in scholarly focus—from imagining ideal futures to developing adaptive strategies for present-day realities. All accepted and presented papers will be published as a Scopus-indexed book series by Springer Nature, reinforcing the academic credibility and global visibility of the conference’s research outcomes.

Commenting on the strong response, Pratyush Shankar, Provost of Navrachana University, noted that the diversity of submissions reflects how resilience is now being examined through interdisciplinary lenses. Contributions span environmental studies, urban planning, economics, digital systems, and social inquiry, underscoring the need to understand resilience not in isolation, but as an interconnected and evolving field.

Equally notable is the geographical spread of the submissions. Researchers and practitioners have contributed from metropolitan centres, emerging cities, and academic hubs across India, as well as from international institutions in countries including the United States and Bangladesh. The participation of national institutes, schools of architecture and planning, research councils, consultants, and global industry players reinforces resilience as a shared global concern shaped by local realities.

The thematic breadth of the research mirrors the complexity of current challenges. Environmental resilience addresses climate intensification and ecological stress, while economic resilience explores responses to instability in markets, livelihoods, and supply chains. Other submissions examine how cities and institutions adapt through governance, planning, and design—reflecting resilience as a multidisciplinary and applied concept.

Vadodara’s own experiences with urban flooding, infrastructure strain, and heritage transformation offer tangible local contexts that distinguish resilience from sustainability. Where sustainability asks how resources can be preserved over time, resilience asks how systems function when they fail, how communities recover from disruption, and how lessons are embedded into future planning.

While Vadodara provides an important reference point, ICR 2026 broadens the conversation to interconnected systems. The conference engages with environmental and climate resilience, urban infrastructure and planning, economic and institutional resilience, social equity and governance, and information and digital resilience—recognising that contemporary challenges rarely occur in isolation.

This academic perspective finds institutional expression through KHOJ, an initiative that anchors ICR 2026. Through KHOJ, students and researchers engage directly with real-world challenges such as flooding, ecological stress, and habitat transformation, using field-based inquiry and documentation to explore how resilience can be built, tested, and refined in lived conditions.

Adding further depth to the conference are distinguished keynote speakers. Rajendra Singh brings insights into community-led ecological resilience, while environmentalist Sandeep Virmani offers practice-driven perspectives rooted in traditional knowledge systems. Shailesh Nayak, Padma Shri awardee, contributes a macro understanding of climate risks and coastal systems. International perspectives are further strengthened by Brian B. Rudkin, associated with One Sustainable Health, who brings global systems-thinking insights to the dialogue.

The International Conference on Resilience (ICR 2026) will be held from January 9 to January 10, 2026, at the Navrachana University campus in Vadodara. Over two days, it will bring together researchers, practitioners, and institutional leaders to explore how resilience—distinct from conventional sustainability—can shape more adaptive, inclusive, and responsive futures.

For more details – https://www.icr2026.com/

If you have any objection to this press release content, kindly contact pr.error.rectification@gmail.com to notify us. We will respond and rectify the situation in the next 24 hours.