Urban Environmental Performance Index: The Quito Pilot Case

In the context of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and its indicators, especially Goal 11, the importance of indicators is paramount to the implementation, monitoring and eventual success of the SDG. However, a review of global sustainability indicators reveals major gaps in coverage, including scientific gaps. Indicators are often siloed, meaning at the urban scale where issues often overlap and intersect, existing indicators do not take into consideration cross-sectoral linkages. Finally, many indicators fail to adequately address social equity or inclusion, a high-priority issue identified as central to new definitions of green economy and sustainable development at Rio+20. This research we developed a case study to pilot new indicators based information available for the city of Quito that address these challenges. The development of this pilot indicators has involved the use of several data collection tools and particularly the treatment of data so it could be available for numerical and graphical analysis. The research relied heavily Open Source platforms and tools to perform the analysis. Ultimately, the objective of this research is to scale the study to other cities around the world and other indicators to create an index that is reliable in measuring the environmental performance of the cities, while considering the social distribution of the environmental impacts inside the city