ASSESSMENT OF URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN HUE CITY AS A CASE STUDY

Hue city was chosen for a pilot application of indicators on environmentally sustainable city, which were developed by Vietnam Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. The indicator set is composed of four key categories (water, air, solid waste and climate change response), which are broken down into 16 underlying performance indicators. In reality, there has not been any assessment process in place to guide cities in Vietnam in doing their own assessment. In this research, an assessment process including 5 steps was built up; and a barometer with 5 classification bands ranging from 0 to 100 was recommended to use for both category and overall assessment. The weighting of 4 urban environmental categories was undertaken based upon a Delphi method with informed inputs from an expert panel. The 5 - step analysis process showed that Hue city was ranked “medium” with the score between 41 - 60 for water and solid waste, “fairly good” in terms of air (score of 85) and “poor” as to climate change response (score of 40). The sum of all category scores of Hue city, which is also rebased to 100, is valued at 60. Thus, the city was ranked “fairly good” in the overall. Such assessment results are much expected to provide assistance in decision-making at various levels of local authority and help them set forth some appropriate improvement measures on urban environmental sustainability issues. As such, the city would soon meet some concerned requirements to become a leading city of Vietnam in urban environmental sustainability.