Where Are Australia's Greenest Cities?

From Treehugger:

Australia maybe the world's sixth largest country, but over 80% of its 23 million people live within 100 kilometres of the coast. This makes it one of the most urbanised nations in the world.

So the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) set out to investigate which of the country's 20 largest cities is the greenest.

The results are contained within their just released Sustainable Cities Index, which ranks Australia's metropolises "with the aim of encouraging healthy competition, stimulating discussion and suggesting new ways of thinking about how our cities can be sustainable".

The winner for 2010 came as bit of a surprise to most people. At first glance you might have considered it close to the city that came last. 15 performance indicators across three aspects of sustainability were considered and ranked equally. These were:

Environmental Performance indicators

Air Quality, Biodiversity, Ecological Footprint, Green Building and Water.

Resilience indicators

Climate Change, Education, Food Production, Household Repayments and Public Participation
Quality of Life indicators
Density, Employment, Health, Subjective Wellbeing and Transport

Crunching the numbers yielded by such indicators gave a final ranking of:

1. Darwin

Darwin Aerial

2. Sunshine Coast

3. Brisbane

4. Townsville

5. Canberra-Queanbeyan

6. Hobart

7. Melbourne

8. Gold Coast-Tweed

9. Cairns

10. Bendigo

11. Toowoomba

12, Sydney

13. Launceston

14. Adelaide (equal 14th)

14. Ballarat (equal 14th)

15. Albury-WodongaWollongong

16. Wollongong

17. Newcastle

18. Geelong

19. Perth

To understand how this was developed, there is a simple visual

Comparative Table (PDF) or the more detailed Sustainable Cities Index Report (PDF).

Would you have picked the ranking?