ARCADIS Sustainable cities index 2015

The purpose of this report is to take 50 of the world’s most prominent cities and look at how viable they are as places to live, their environmental impact, their financial stability, and how these elements complement. The cities included within this report were selected to provide an overview of the planet’s cities, providing not only wide-ranging geographical coverage, but also a variety of levels of economic development, expectations of future growth and an assortment of sustainability challenges.

The report provides a detailed, evidence-based metric to quantify each city’s performance and develops a composite index of sustainability, created from combining many other input indices that each measure single aspects of urban performance.

The overall purpose of this report is not to create a hierarchy of elite cities, but to indicate areas of opportunity as cities continue to make progress on their missions to become more sustainable economically, environmentally and for the good of their inhabitants.