Page 1 of 1 URBAN LAND USE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE: PROSPECTS OF SUSTAINABILITY INDICATORS & INDEX SYSTEMS Aliyu Salisu Barau Department of Urban & Regional Planning, Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, aliyubarau1@yahoo.co.uk ABSTRACT This paper examines the impacts and vulnerabilities of urban areas to the global environmental change (GEC) in the context of urban land use (ULU) and globalisation scenarios. We examined one dozen typologies of urban sustainability indicator and index systems. We find that all of them concentrated on the local effects rather than regional and global impacts of urbanisation. We used theories of global city relations (Friedmann, 1986, Sassen, 1991) and Zipf’s law of urban hierarchy to develop new sets of indicators. The indicators could be integrated into existing urban sustainability index models. The paper concludes that measuring sustainability performance of any city in situ is not enough at the age of globalisation. Risks associated with urban land use developments diffuse to other cities and layers of global environmental systems. KEYWORDS: urban sustainability, global environmental change, indictors/index. INTRODUCTION Natural and social scientists identify land use as a priority research question in the global environmental change (GEC) agenda (International Council for Science [ICSU], 2010). The scientific community also upholds environmental thesis against dominance of economic themes in explaining city-globalisation nexus (Marcotullio, 2008). The conflating global urban network system accelerates cities consumption of ecosystem goods and services. The hazards and risks associated with rapid urbanisation are more pervasive and critical in the Third World. From Asia, Latin America to Africa, city populations are increasingly becoming vulnerable. Vulnerabilities are based on cities exposure to climate change, land degradation, poverty, wastewater and infrastructural decay among others. However, these crises credentials would not overshadow the fact that these urban areas are major contributors to global environmental change (GEC). Urban areas consume 70% of the global net energy and its associated emissions (Seto and Satterthwaite, 2010). This is in addition to other terrestrial changes that affect global biogeochemical processes. Ecosystem services include temperature attenuation, hydrological circulation, decomposition of detoxification of wastes, aesthetics (Yu et al., 2010). The impacts of global urbanisation and its intensity on the global environmental sustainability are enormous. This is clearer if we consider the fact that as of the year 2000, the land area of global urban areas was merely 2.8% of the total land area of the planet earth (CIESIN, 2007). Another estimation shows that the size of urban built up areas is merely 0.3% of the global land mass (Martine, 2008). For most developing countries, problems of urban areas are related urban land use (ULU), land management, and land tenure systems (UN-Habitat/GLTN, 2010). Urban form in most developing countries determines emission levels. Sprawl city forms favour more commuting and hence more emission (Marcotullio, 2001). In the context of global environmental change, urban land is of critical importance. Location of an urban area and its geography are closely related with its vulnerability and its contribution to the GEC. For instance, 75% of all large cities are located along the coast (UN- Habitat, 2008). No less than 18% of the Asia’s 2.3 billion population lives in low elevation coastal zones -LECZ (de-Sherbinin, 2011). Such cities are vulnerable and serve as arteries for redistribution of global risks. Based on these revelations, it appears that cities are major drivers of land use and land cover changes (Sanchez-Rodriguez, 2002). Increase in population, economic prosperity, and environmental risks have direct impacts on cities land systems. The differential effects and dynamics of urban landscapes depend on their level of income (Darrel and Potere, 2010). Conversion of urban lands into economic and industrial landscapes affects local ecosystem services. Stone, Jr. (2009) suggests that land use conversion into urban uses is more critical for raising emission levels. Most of the efforts for measuring problems of urban environmental sustainability are not disassociated with realities of interconnectedness and interdependencies of the global ecosystems and economic processes. In other words, understanding the vulnerabilities of the Asian cities should be in isolation with economic and