d A Framework for the Integration of Regional Environmental Quality Assessment in Spatial Planning

Abstract

The increasing urbanization across different parts of the world, especially in India, has newlinebrought several environmental degradation issues. Hence, the need of the hour is to newlineaccommodate this growing urbanization through appropriate policy interventions and newlinespatial planning processes. One of the main drawbacks of the conventional spatial newlineplanning system in India is that it focuses primarily on assessing the land, mainly in newlineterms of economic aspects rather than integrating the environmental aspects. Thus the newlineoccurrences of haphazard developments may lead to several adverse ecological and newlinesocio-economic outcomes. These environmental degradation problems are currently newlineaddressed, assessed, and quantified by different methods/tools at different spatial scales, newlinefrom global to local. However, a detailed review of the literature reveals a lack of newlineresearch at the regional and local scales. Hence, the present research focuses on the newlineregional environmental quality assessment and integration into the conventional spatial newlineplanning system. Accordingly, it is structured under four research objectives. newlineEnvironmental quality is a heterogeneous component of environmental (air quality, newlinewater quality, biophysical parameters, etc.) and socio-economic indicators (population newlinedensity, quality of housing, access to basic amenities, per capita income, etc.). Thus, the newlinefirst research objective aims to identify and finalize the regional environmental quality newlineassessment variables. The process started with a systematic literature review, followed newlineby five different screening levels to arrive at the final list of variables. The second newlineobjective deals with constructing the Environmental Quality Index (EQI) for the study newlineregion through multivariate analytical processes, namely the Principal Component newlineAnalysis (PCA). The methodological approach involved in the composite index