The Urban Environment and Social Inclusion Index (UESI) creates a new spatial framework to measure progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG-11), which aims for cities to be both sustainable and inclusive by 2030. Few data
sources or indices, however, measure its progress in both a comprehensive (global coverage) and detailed (intra-city) manner. To address this gap, we use publicly-available, spatial datasets from detailed census data, satellite remote sensing, and crowdsourced data that provide global coverage and regular temporal resolution to develop spatially-explicit indicators to measure neighborhood-level environmental
performance in 164 global cities. The UESI framework includes five issues areas: air quality, climate change, water and sanitation, urban ecosystem, and transportation, with 10 indicators that assess air pollution, urban tree cover, public transit access, and urban heat at the neighborhood scale, and water stress and carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels at the city-level. We also present a new method for assessing environmental equity -- how evenly or unevenly cities are distributing environmental benefits and burdens across neighborhoods. We find that the majority of the UESI cities disproportionately burden lower-income communities with higher shares of environmental burdens and lower shares of benefits.