A composite index for sustainability assessment of health, safety and environmental performance in municipalities of megacities

Sustainability assessment tools have provided a way for local authorities to assess their performance towards sustainable development. However, a major problem of existing methods is the lack of an integrated assessment approach to cover significant aspects of municipalities’ activities, namely Health, Safety and Environment (HSE). This study was conducted to address the aggregation of these key municipal aspects by combining them into an integrated assessment index. Tehran municipalities are used as a case study. The Exploratory Factor Analysis method was applied to reduce the complexity of HSE indicators and build the index. The final results integrated a set of 62 indicators into 20 factors based on 6 HSE sustainability themes. In addition, the Sustainability Assessment Index (SAI) was formed by combining 6 sub-indices based on the HSE themes. Finally, the level of HSE sustainability performance in the municipality was divided into four levels, regarding their progress. The findings showed that the best HSE sustainability performance was performed on the Health-Environment intersection theme. Moreover, the majority of Tehran municipalities were classified in level 3 (moderate) on HSE sustainability performance, emerging the need of reviewing the plans and programs that are related to municipal sustainable development by considering district-centered HSE issues.