Corporate Knights inaugural Sustainable Cities Index ranks 50 global cities on air quality, emissions, renewable energy and other sustainability measures.
The Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities Index is the world’s first interactive, crowd-sourced sustainability index for cities. When the index goes live on June 15, 2022, local government officials will be able to log in to our user-friendly data hub, provide 15 simple data points, and join municipalities from around the world in a comparative assessment of sustainability metrics. The interactive data hub will promote engagement with the participating cities and continuous improvements in the index.
The Corporate Knights have drawn on leading world experts and their 20 years of experience in rating and ranking to produce a concise and robust index that tracks 12 key indicators of urban sustainability related to climate change, air quality, land use, transportation, water, waste, policy, and resilience. Their research division has seeded the quantitative, outcomes-focused index with an initial group of 50 cities using public data that will grow as cities visit the interactive data hub and submit their metrics to the database.
As the highest-performing city in the 2022 Sustainable Cities Index universe, Stockholm, Sweden, is a leader in urban sustainability. It has the lowest Scope 1 GHG emissions per capita in Europe, so it’s no surprise that the Swedish capital has some of the best air quality of European cities. Both residents and visitors enjoy Stockholm’s wealth of open space, such as Djurgården and Ivar Los Park. Stockholmers also have the lowest number of vehicles per household of European cities in the 2022 index universe and opt for more sustainable transport modes.
- Stockholm
- Oslo
- Copenhagen
- Lahti
- London
- Helsinki
- Tokyo
- Vancouver
- Toronto
- Berlin
- Ottawa
- Cape Town
- Madrid
- Curitiba/Brazil
- Accra
- San Francisco
- Paris
- Halifax
- New York City
- Montreal
Indicators
The 2022 Sustainable Cities Index is composed of 12 quantitative indicators of environmental sustainability performance. The method is simple: for each of the indicators, the necessary data points are collected, either from public data sources or directly from the cities themselves, through the Corporate Knights interactive data hub. Values for each of the 12 indicators are converted to a score out of 1.0. Based on the scores of each indicator, each city will receive a letter grade and rank for their overall score on the index.
Visit source page for further info and interactive charts. Detailed scoring method is available in the full methodology document.
