Title : Geospatial intelligence for sustainable cities: An integrated environmental and waste management index
Abstract:
Rapid urbanization intensifies interconnected ecological, climatic, atmospheric, hydrological, and environmental-management pressures, necessitating integrated approaches to urban environmental assessment. This study develops a multidimensional Urban Environment Index (UEI) to quantify environmental sustainability conditions in Bengaluru, Delhi, and Indore, India, from 2020 to 2025. The framework integrates 30 indicators across seven themes. The themes are, namely, ecological, water, thermal, climate, air, urbanisation pressure, and environmental management. Earth observation, atmospheric, climatic, and official environmental-management datasets were harmonized spatially and temporally, followed by direction-specific normalization and two-level Shannon entropy weighting. Theme-specific indices were integrated using weighted geometric aggregation to reduce unrestricted compensation among environmental dimensions. Results reveal pronounced inter-city and temporal heterogeneity. Bengaluru declined from a UEI of 41.95 in 2021 to 3.33 in 2025, while Delhi remained consistently in the severe category throughout the study period. Indore showed substantial variability, reaching 34.15 in 2023. Obstacle analysis identified urbanization pressure as a major constraint in Bengaluru and Delhi, whereas thermal and climatic stress dominated Indore. Validation demonstrated strong agreement with equal weighting (ρ = 0.820, p < 0.001) and high stability under ±20% perturbations to theme weights (ρ = 0.994). The proposed UEI provides a transparent, diagnostic framework for identifying city-specific environmental priorities and supporting evidence-based, climate-resilient urban planning.
