Measuring global human access to essential daily necessities and services

Equitable access to daily necessities and services is crucial for enhancing human quality of life and is integral to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. However, knowledge about global access to these essential resources remains limited and fragmented, primarily due to the absence of a comprehensive infrastructure inventory and scalable measures of accessibility. Here we compiled the most extensive global database of points of interest (POI) to represent six essential infrastructure categories—living, healthcare, education, entertainment, public transit, and work. We used refined 30-meter resolution friction surface data to map travel times to these critical infrastructures as a proxy for accessibility across the urban-rural continuum and assessed disparities across geographic, urbanization, and socio-economic contexts. Our results reveal that access to daily necessities and services is unevenly distributed in terms of total infrastructure, per capita availability, and travel time. Globally, only 38.7% (2.6 billion people) and 50.7 % (3.4 billion people) of the population resides within a 15-minute and 30-minute walking distance of essential daily necessities and services, respectively. These results highlight the urgent need to optimize strategies for planning, allocation, and management of critical infrastructure to promote inclusive and sustainable development.