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

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. © 2016 University of Newcastle upon Tyne