A parcel-scale assessment tool to measure sustainability through urban ecosystem components: The MUSIX model

•This study developed a new comprehensive urban ecosystem sustainability assessment tool entitled the “Micro-level Urban-ecosystem Sustainability IndeX” (MUSIX).•The findings have shown that MUSIX has the potential to be used for benchmarking sustainability performances, particularly at the micro-level, by developing a set of relevant parcel-scale indicators.•The results of MUSIX provided fundamental information that assists planners and policy-makers to investigate the multidimensional nature of sustainability by capturing the environmental pressures and their driving forces in highly developed urban areas.

In recent years a number of urban sustainability assessment frameworks are developed to better inform policy formulation and decision-making processes. This paper introduces one of these attempts in developing a comprehensive assessment tool—i.e., Micro-level Urban-ecosystem Sustainability IndeX (MUSIX). Being an indicator-based indexing model, MUSIX investigates the environmental impacts of land-uses on urban sustainability by measuring urban ecosystem components in local scale. The paper presents the methodology of MUSIX and demonstrates the performance of the model in a pilot test-bed—i.e., in Gold Coast, Australia. The model provides useful insights on the sustainability performance of the test-bed area. The parcel-scale findings of the indicators are used to identify local problems considering six main issues of urban development—i.e., hydrology; ecology; pollution; location; design, and; efficiency. The composite index score is used to propose betterment strategies to guide the development of local area plans in conjunction with the City's Planning Scheme. In overall, this study has shown that parcel-scale environmental data provides an overview of the local sustainability in urban areas as in the example of Gold Coast, which can also be used for setting environmental policy, objectives and targets.