Integrating urban ecosystem sustainability assessment into policy-making: insights from the Gold Coast City

Abstract

This paper introduces a policy-making support tool called ‘Micro-level Urban-ecosystem Sustainability IndeX (MUSIX)’. The index serves as a sustainability assessment model that monitors six aspects of urban ecosystems – hydrology, ecology, pollution, location, design, and efficiency – based on parcel-scale indicators. This index is applied in a case study investigation in the Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia. The outcomes reveal that there are major environmental problems caused by increased impervious surfaces from growing urban development in the study area. The findings suggest that increased impervious surfaces are linked to increased surface runoff, car dependency, transport-related pollution, poor public transport accessibility, and unsustainable built environment. This paper presents how the MUSIX outputs can be used to guide policy-making through the evaluation of existing policies.

Keywords:

• urban ecosystem
• sustainability assessment
• composite index
• parcel-scale spatial analysis
• Gold Coast City

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of the project partners, research team and expert panel members.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is an outcome of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project [grant number ARCLP0882637], jointly funded by the Commonwealth Government of Australia, Gold Coast City Council, Queensland Transport and Main Roads, and Queensland University of Technology (QUT).