Urban sustainability metrics

This fact sheet by the Stockholm Environment Institute provides an overview of urban sustainability metrics, comparing index-based and indicator-based systems and proposing a cyclical pathway for municipal governments to measure and monitor sustainability performance.

• Urban sustainability frameworks typically organize information into three core themes: environment, society, and economy, though some expand these to include governance, culture and heritage, and space.
• There are two primary strategies for conveying sustainability assessment results: indexes (or scorecards), which aggregate indicator values into single numbers for easier city-to-city comparison, and indicator systems, which report results separately to allow for better tailoring to a city's specific needs.
• A review of 16 urban sustainability and bond frameworks, alongside business sustainability frameworks, identified 310 indicators across 44 categories and four main themes: environment, social, economy, and governance.
• The authors propose a cyclical 'indicator pathway' for municipal decision-making, suggesting that cities use metrics at three specific stages: baseline assessment, ex-ante impact assessment during planning, and ex-post impact assessment after project completion.
• Current municipal sustainability reporting faces challenges due to a lack of commonly accepted criteria regarding the choice of system, the number of indicators, and whether metrics are quantitative or qualitative.
• In Sweden, municipal sustainability data is reported through various channels, including sustainability plans, the Kolada open database, and Statistics Sweden (SCB), though differing priorities and qualitative measurements hinder full comparability.

APA

Requena, A., & Vanhuyse, F. (2022). Urban sustainability metrics. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/urban-sustainability-metrics-seifactsheet.pdf

Chicago

Requena, Alicia, and Fedra Vanhuyse. Urban sustainability metrics. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2022. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/urban-sustainability-metrics-seifactsheet.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Requena |first1=Alicia |last2=Vanhuyse |first2=Fedra |title=Urban sustainability metrics |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=June 2022 |url=https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/urban-sustainability-metrics-seifactsheet.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{requena2022urban, author = {Requena, Alicia and Vanhuyse, Fedra}, title = {{Urban sustainability metrics}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2022}, month = jun, url = {https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/urban-sustainability-metrics-seifactsheet.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }