Abstract

The concepts of territorial resilience and vulnerability are useful tools for representing the sustainability of regional development. In particular, a holistic approach allows taking into account the social and environmental dimensions of local systems. Sustainable development owns a cumulative and multidimensional nature, and it must be empirically analyzed in the complex relationships among indicators of income and employment, social capital and institutional quality, land use and biodiversity. In this paper the authors build new maps of resilience and vulnerability in the European regions through multivariate techniques, studying the direct and indirect relationships between these indicators and sustainable development objective variables.