It's no secret that Toronto has been quickly moving up on the world stage over the past few decades, with the city growing bigger and more diverse with each passing year, and a new World's Best Cities Report ranks Toronto as the 13th best city in the world.

The report, released Thursday by Resonance Consultancy, ranks the world's 100 top-performing principal cities with metropolitan populations of one million or more based on the relative quality of the place, reputation and competitive identity.

"The World's Best Cities rankings are composed of experiential factors that people consider most important in choosing a city to live and visit, as well as empirical factors that business decision-makers consider important for business or investment," said Resonance President and CEO Chris Fair in a statement.

And while Resonance Consultancy's report is typically lauded as the world's most thorough city ranking based on original methodology that analyzes key statistics as well as user-generated reviews and online activity in channels such as Google, Facebook and Instagram, they even added three new factors to better reflect the impact of the pandemic as well as cities' responses to it for the 2021 version. 

The ranking considers factors that show positive correlations with attracting employment, investment and/or visitors, including everything from the number of culinary experiences, museums, and sights and landmarks each city offers, to the number of Global 500 corporations, direct flight connections and mentions each city has on Instagram.

And new for the pandemic, the 2021 ranking also considers each city's unemployment rate (as of July 2020, the latest numbers available at press time), the Gini Index of Income Inequality and the number of COVID-19 cases per million (as of July 31, 2020).

Based on all this and more, Toronto comes in at number 13 on the list. 

"With almost half of its population foreign-born, Toronto's #13 spot among the world's cities—it's highest finish ever—is powered by diversity and education, the two components of our People category, for which the city ranks #3, just behind Dubai and Abu Dhabi," notes the report. 

"But Toronto's diversity is less tied to migrant labor and more to the long-term opportunity in a city that earlier this summer was crowned as the fastest growing metropolitan area in all of North America."

Taking the top spot in the ranking is London, followed by New York City and Paris. 

Here are the 15 best cities in the world, according to the ranking: 

1. London, England
2. New York City, USA
3. Paris, France
4. Moscow, Russia
5. Tokyo, Japan
6. Dubai, United Arab Emirates
7. Singapore, Republic of Singapore
8. Barcelona, Spain
9. Los Angeles, USA
10. Madrid, Spain
11. Rome, Italy
12. Chicago, USA
13. Toronto, Canada 
14. San Francisco, USA
15. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

In a news release about the report, Fair noted that these cities face unprecedented challenges brought on by the pandemic that will define their next decade and beyond, and he added that cities will only be able to recover quickly and effectively with the proper financial support and policies.

Still, it's no small feat that even with the crisis that is the COVID-19 pandemic, Toronto is considered one of the best cities in the world for 2021.

"The city's openness, combined with its economy (with the eighth-most Global 500 head offices in the world) has resulted in unprecedented density and a satisfaction with just staying put, sated by real estate wealth and the comfort that the world is already in town," the report states of Toronto. 

"Of course, winning the first NBA title outside of the U.S. in history doesn't hurt the local pride, either."