Component criticality analysis of infrastructure systems has traditionally focused on physical networks rather than infrastructure services. As an example, a key objective of transport infrastructure is to ensure mobility and resilient access to public services, including for the population, service providers, and associated supply chains. We introduce a new user-centric measure for estimating infrastructure criticality and urban accessibility to critical public services - particularly healthcare facilities without loss of generality - and the effects of disaster-induced infrastructure disruptions. Accessibility measures include individuals’ choices of all services in each sector. The approach is scalable and modular while preserving detailed features necessary for local planning decisions. It relies on open data to simulate various disaster scenarios, including floods, seismic, and compound shocks. We present results for Lima, Peru, and Manila, Philippines, to illustrate how the approach identifies the most affected areas by shocks, underserved populations, and changes in accessibility and critical infrastructure components. We capture the changes in people’s choices of health service providers under each scenario. For Lima, we show that the floods of 2020 caused an increase in average access times to all health services from 33 minutes to 48 minutes. We identify specific critical road segments for ensuring access under each scenario. For Manila, we locate the 22% of the population who lost complete access to all higher health services due to flooding of over 15 cm. The approach is used to identify and prioritize targeted measures to strengthen the resilience of critical public services and their supporting infrastructure systems, while putting the population at the center of decision-making.

Air pollution is one of the leading causes of health complications and mortality worldwide, especially affecting lower-income groups, who tend to be more exposed and vulnerable. This study documents the relationship between ambient air pollution exposure and poverty in 211 countries and territories. Using the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2021 revised fine particulate matter (PM2.5) thresholds, we show that globally, 7.3 billion people are directly exposed to unsafe average annual PM2.5 concentrations, 80 percent of whom live in low- and middle-income countries. Moreover, 716 million of the world’s lowest income people (living on less than $1.90 per day) live in areas with unsafe levels of air pollution, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Air pollution levels are particularly high in lower-middle-income countries, where economies tend to rely more heavily on polluting industries and technologies. These findings are based on high-resolution air pollution and population maps with global coverage, as well as subnational poverty estimates based on harmonized household surveys.