Toward an environmental index of sustainability to be adopted in urban contexts

Local authorities are called to play a remarkable role in carrying out methods and guidelines referring to the sustainable development, mainly depending on the qualitative and quantitative relevance of urban activities as environmental pressure factors. Innovative scientific methods are required, in order to express global effect of environmental management options in a synthetic way. Within this framework, a new synthetic index is here introduced, able to single out the whole environmental performance of urban systems. The index, taking into account, by means of a suitable aggregation, some selected indicators, can be usefully adopted to assess energetic and environmental profiles of urban ecosystems. Such index could be useful in the management of sustainability at an urban level and it could aid to define suitable developing plans, according with economic and environmental points of view. Particularly, this novel algorithm is characterised by a weighting rule, which defines a hierarchical priority among the policy options to be comparatively ranked.