Turning Territorial Data into Wellbeing and Health Outcomes
- geoadaptive
- Dec 12, 2025
- 6 min read
Urban health is no longer a downstream outcome of policy, it is the lens through which climate, urban planning, and development decisions are increasingly evaluated.This blog explores why wellbeing has emerged as the operational bridge between climate action and health outcomes, and how cities can move from fragmented data to integrated, neighborhood-scale decision-making through Urban Health Intelligence.
From climate and cities to health outcomes
The global urban agenda is undergoing a structural transformation. Following the C40 Summit and the discussions leading into COP30 in Belém, a shared conclusion has emerged across cities, multilateral institutions, and health organizations. Urban health has become the most concrete and measurable expression of sustainability.
This shift is driven by evidence. Air pollution remains the leading environmental risk factor for premature mortality worldwide, with 99% of the global population exposed to air quality levels exceeding WHO guidelines (WHO, 2023). Urban heat exposure is intensifying due to climate change and urban form, increasing mortality by 2% to 12% during extreme heat events, particularly in Latin American cities (The Lancget, 2022). At the same time, inefficient mobility systems continue to impose heavy burdens on physical and mental health, productivity, and equity, with average daily travel times in the region exceeding 75 minutes per person (OECD, 2023).
Yet, despite growing recognition of these challenges, a critical gap persist on cities, especially intermediate and small cities, lack integrated, spatially explicit data systems capable of linking environmental conditions, urban form, and health outcomes at the neighborhood scale.
Wellbeing and Health: from outcomes to territorial determinants
For decades, urban wellbeing and health policy focused primarily on healthcare systems, service provision, and disease treatment. However, international consensus has now moved beyond this sectoral approach. Health is increasingly understood as a territorial outcome, shaped by the environments in which people live, move, and work. The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. This definition places wellbeing at the core of health, not as a secondary or abstract concept, but as its foundational condition.
Under this framework, wellbeing and health are inseparable. Health outcomes are determined by cumulative exposure to environmental and urban conditions, including:
chronic exposure to air pollutants such as PM₂.₅ and NO₂,
sustained thermal stress driven by urban heat islands,
limited access to green spaces and ecological services,
long and inequitable travel times,
and uneven access to social and economic opportunities.
These factors do not operate independently. They accumulate spatially, producing neighborhoods where everyday life entails a higher health burden long before individuals interact with the healthcare system.This understanding underpins global frameworks such as:
Health in All Policies (WHO),
Healthy Cities and Communities (PAHO),
Urban Monitoring Framework (UN-Habitat),
and Well-being Metrics (OECD).
Within this paradigm, wellbeing becomes the operational bridge between climate, urban planning, and health policy, enabling prevention, prioritization, and targeted intervention.
Index of Determinants of Wellbeing and Health (IDBS) by GeoAdaptive 2025.
The need for Urban Health Intelligence
While the determinants of urban health are increasingly well documented, cities still struggle to translate this knowledge into action. The challenge is not the absence of data, but the fragmentation of data across sectors, scales, and institutions. Environmental datasets are often available at coarse resolutions (7–25 km), insufficient for urban decision-making. Health statistics are typically aggregated at administrative levels that mask intra-urban inequalities. Mobility, land use, and ecological data are rarely integrated into a unified analytical framework.
In this context, Urban Health Intelligence is presented as an innovative response to a core limitation of existing planning tools: their static nature. Cities are dynamic systems, where exposure to air pollution, heat, mobility stress, and environmental risk evolves continuously. Yet most urban health and climate decisions rely on fixed snapshots that quickly become outdated.
The Urban Health Intelligence platform, and the IDBS at its core, introduces a living, continuously updated analytical system, designed to reflect how urban wellbeing and health conditions change month by month. This periodic updating allows cities not only to diagnose current conditions, but to monitor trends, detect emerging risks, and assess the direction of change over time, strengthening preventive and adaptive decision-making.
As highlighted during COP30 and reinforced by the Belém Action Plan for Health and Climate promoted by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), cities urgently need tools that:
integrate environmental, social, and spatial data,
operate at neighborhood scale,
support climate adaptation and health resilience,
and align with international financing and policy frameworks.
Urban Health Intelligence responds to this need by transforming fragmented datasets into actionable, spatially explicit, and regularly updated evidence, enabling cities to move from static analysis to dynamic, health-oriented urban governance.
Index of Determinants of Wellbeing and Health (IDBS)
In response to these challenges, GeoAdaptive has developed the Index of Determinants of Wellbeing and Health (IDBS) as part of its Urban Health Intelligence approach.
The IDBS is a geospatial intelligence system designed to evaluate how environmental, climatic, social, ecological, and economic conditions interact to shape urban health and quality of life at the intra-urban scale. Rather than focusing on isolated indicators, the index supports a systems-based perspective, enabling policymakers to identify where multiple pressures converge and where interventions can generate the greatest co-benefits.
The index integrates five interconnected dimensions:
Health / Air Quality
Climatic Comfort / Urban Heat
Social Services and Mobility
National Environment
Economic Dynamics
Normalize Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) Bogota, by GeoAdaptive 2025.
Innovation and value added
The value of the IDBS lies not only in advanced analytics, but in how it reframes complex information into policy-relevant insight. Through a unified wellbeing lens, cities can:
identify priority neighborhoods where exposure to environmental and social stressors overlaps,
align climate adaptation, mobility, health, and land-use investments,
support preventive approaches rather than reactive healthcare responses, and
strengthen the case for integrated funding mechanisms tied to health and climate outcomes.
In this sense, the IDBS functions as a decision-support tool, helping cities move from diagnosis to action, whether through green infrastructure, mobility reform, heat adaptation strategies, or targeted social investment.
Downscaling of PM₂.₅, by GeoAdaptive 2025.
Pilot applications: from concept to territory
GeoAdaptive developed the initial pilot application of the IDBS for Bogotá, Colombia, as a proof of concept to demonstrate how Urban Health Intelligence can be operationalized at the city scale.
A defining strength of this pilot lies in its territorial granularity, which allows wellbeing and health determinants to be examined at the scale of everyday urban life, blocks, neighborhoods, and local corridors, rather than through aggregated citywide averages that tend to obscure inequality. This level of precision is fundamental for public policy, as it mirrors the spatial logic through which cities design programs, prioritize investments, and implement interventions on the ground.
The Bogotá application integrates environmental conditions, mobility patterns, ecological assets, population distribution, and economic activity into a unified spatial perspective, revealing how multiple stressors and opportunities converge within specific urban areas. By doing so, it enables decision-makers to understand not only where health-related challenges are concentrated, but how intensely they are experienced across different parts of the city and how these conditions evolve over time.
Beyond this first implementation, the pilot consolidates a transferable and scalable knowledge base, including data structures, spatial models, and indicator logic, that enables the approach to be replicated and adapted across diverse urban contexts, particularly intermediate small cities where fine-scale data is often limited.
By grounding wellbeing in territory with this level of spatial resolution, cities gain clarity not only on where challenges are concentrated, but on how intensely they are experienced and why they emerge, supporting more precise, equitable, and preventative policy responses.
Night-Time Light Data (NTL) Bogota, by GeoAdaptive 2025.
Wellbeing as the new operating system for urban health
The message emerging from C40, COP30, and the growing health–climate agenda is unequivocal, the future of urban policy will be evaluated through its ability to reduce exposure, improve wellbeing, and protect health.
Urban Health Intelligence, and specifically the IDBS, positions wellbeing not as an abstract aspiration, but as a measurable, territorial, and actionable outcome.
By linking climate, environment, urban form, mobility, and economic activity into a single analytical framework, GeoAdaptive contributes to a new generation of decision-support tools that allow cities and institutions to move from fragmented data to integrated health-oriented action.
In this emerging paradigm, sustainability is no longer measured only in emissions avoided, but in lives improved.
Interested in learning more?
If you would like to explore this initiative further, collaborate on pilot applications, or discuss how Urban Health Intelligence can support your city or institution, we invite you to get in touch and continue the conversation.
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