New Environmental Indicators for Sustainable Cities of Varying Size Scale: The Use Case of France

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more data about our environment are available. Those data might be of various sources and types such as quality of life, energy consumption or any other domain that may have an impact on people’s environment. However, when it comes to evaluating the quality of our environment, a lot of approaches exist which are not easy to use. Hence, this paper introduces a new methodology to calculate an environmental score for cities which takes into account pollution (water and air) indicators, energy consumption, soil uses and artificialization and habitat insulation. This method compares those data with social indicators such as unemployment rate and our purpose is to help city leaders to understand the statement of their city on the environmental topics. Moreover, the methodology that is proposed in this paper can be applied by all French cities, regardless of their size, since it only uses free open source verified data. The calculated scores are available on 31 cities of different size from the Occitanie region in France. As a finding of this paper, we identified that bigger cities have a smaller environmental score while smaller cities get higher scores. Environmental low score for big cities is most often due to low air quality, artificialization of soils and high electrical consumption. With the smaller cities, unemployment and poverty rates are lower, as well as drinkable water quality, mostly due to the chlorine quantity in water.