Environmental sustainability benchmarking of the U.S. and Canada metropoles: An expert judgment-based multi-criteria decision making approach Gokhan Egilmez a,⇑ , Serkan Gumus b , Murat Kucukvar c a Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58108, United States b Turkish Military Academy, Department of Basic Sciences, Ankara 06654, Turkey c Department of Industrial Engineering, Istanbul Sehir University, Uskudar, Istanbul 34662, Turkey article info Article history: Received 27 November 2013 Received in revised form 18 August 2014 Accepted 29 August 2014 Keywords: Sustainability benchmarking Intuitionistic fuzzy transformation Multi-criteria decision making U.S. and Canada metropoles Sustainable city abstract In this paper, environmental sustainability performance assessment of 27 U.S. and Canada metropoles is addressed. A four-step hierarchical fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making approach is developed. In the first step, the proposed methodology is established by determining the sustainability performance indi- cators (a total of 16 sustainability indicators are considered), collecting the data and contacting experts from academia, U.S. government agencies and within the industry. In the second step, experts are contacted and the entire list is finalized; sustainability performance evaluation forms are delivered; and then expert judgment results are obtained and quantified, respectively. In the third step, the proposed Multi-criteria Intuitionistic Fuzzy Decision Making model is developed and sustainability performance scores are quantified by using the collected data, multi-criteria decision making model and sustainability indicator weights obtained from expert judgment phase. In the final step, the sustain- ability scores and rankings of the 27 metropoles, results analysis and discussions, and statistical highlights about the research findings are provided. Results indicated that the average sustainability performance score is found to be 0.524 over scale between 0 and 1. The metropole with the greatest sustainability performance score is found to be New York with 0.703 and the poorest performing city is identified as Cleveland with 0.394. The results of the statistical analysis indicate that the greatest significant correla- tions are obtained with carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions per person (0.749 – significant negative correlation with sustainability performance score) and share of workers traveling by public transport (+0.753 – significant positive correlation with sustainability performance score). Therefore, the CO 2 emissions and public transport are found to have the most significant impact on the sustainability scores. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Introduction Sustainable development In 1983, sustainable development was first initiated as an envi- ronmentally friendly, economically feasible and socially acceptable growth philosophy in the Brundtland Commission, which was formally named as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). Sustainable development was defined as ‘‘the development that meets the needs of the present without com- promising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’’ (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Today, sustainable development initiatives are becoming more crucial due to considerably high deteriorating effects of industrial and service activities on the earth’s carrying capacity (Egilmez & Park, 2014; Egilmez & Tatari, 2011). In this regard, it is critical to evaluate the environmental burdens to make policies toward realizing the objectives of sustainable development. Specifically, environmental impact categories, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy consumption, toxic releases, water withdrawals and hazardous waste generation have become cornerstones of any environmental impact assessment study in sustainability research (Bevilacqua, Ciarapica, & Giacchetta, 2012; Egilmez, Kucukvar, & Tatari, 2013; Egilmez, Kucukvar, Tatari, & Bhutta, 2014; Kucukvar & Tatari, 2013). On the importance of metropoles Among the important focus areas for a sustainable future; governments, politicians, social actors and all the stakeholders that are involved in broad long term decision making processes need http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.08.006 0264-2751/Published by Elsevier Ltd. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: gokhan.egilmez@ndsu.edu (G. Egilmez). Cities 42 (2015) 31–41 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cities journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities