Environmental Mobility Index
Mapping Urban Inequality Through Satellite Forensics
Overview
Every city has a geography of burden. The neighborhoods where air quality is worst are almost never the neighborhoods with the best public transport. The communities that breathe the most polluted air are almost always the communities least connected to the rest of the city. This is not coincidence. It is the product of decades of planning decisions, industrial siting, and infrastructure investment that systematically concentrated environmental cost in the same places it concentrated mobility exclusion.
The Environmental Mobility Index makes that geography visible. EMI combines satellite imagery, open-source pollution data, and urban mobility infrastructure datasets to produce a city-level forensic map of the overlap between pollution corridors and transport access gaps.
The Problem
Cities produce vast amounts of environmental and mobility data. Air quality monitoring stations, satellite imagery, transport network maps, traffic sensors — the data exists. But it is almost never brought together in a form that reveals the structural relationship between pollution and mobility inequality. Each dataset lives in a different institutional silo, managed by a different agency, reported in a different format.
The communities most affected — who know from daily experience that their neighborhood is both polluted and poorly served — have no independent, verifiable evidence of the structural pattern they live inside. EMI closes that gap.
The Methodology
Three layers:
Pollution Corridor Mapping
Sentinel-5P atmospheric data and ground-level sensor readings combined with industrial discharge records and satellite land use analysis to produce a multi-year pollution intensity map.
Mobility Infrastructure Analysis
OpenStreetMap data, GTFS transit feeds, and satellite imagery produce a mobility access index measuring transport density, frequency, and quality at neighborhood level.
Overlap Analysis
The two layers are cross-referenced to identify zones of double burden — neighborhoods scoring high on pollution and low on mobility access simultaneously.
Who It's For
City governments and urban planners
Independent verification of whether environmental and mobility investments reach the neighborhoods that need them most.
Insurance companies and real estate investors
Long-term urban risk indicator — neighborhoods with double burden today carry compounding health, liability, and property value risk tomorrow.
Urban planning consultancies
Independent forensic data layer strengthening client deliverables and policy recommendations.
Journalists and civil society
Structural urban inequality made legible, visually communicable, and citable.
Pilot
The EMI pilot is being developed for Sakarya, Turkey — an industrial city with eighteen months of existing satellite archive, established community relationships.
The Sakarya pilot will produce the first complete EMI city report, combining satellite pollution data with transport access analysis and community testimony.
EMI has been accepted into the EIT Urban Mobility Startup Creation Programme by BGI — a European accelerator providing mentorship, business development support, and access to the EIT Urban Mobility ecosystem across Europe.
Status
In active development. Pilot data collection underway. First city report expected Q4 2026.