climate resilient systems | caring futures | equal cities
Care Infrastructure Mapping
Visualising care gaps to shape equal cities & caring futures
Resource Type
Model
Current Status
One pilot complete. Currently being refined. Preparing for second pilot rollout across 5 cities in India and one city each in Sri Lanka and Nepal in collaboration with partners, starting April 2026.
A geo-referenced care gap assessment tool that maps availability, quality, and accessibility of health and care services to reveal care infrastructure gaps and response capacity under climate-induced stress to reveal care infrastructure gaps and inform policy, planning and investments.
01
What it is?
A Care Gap Assessment Tool that uses geo-referenced mapping to visualise where care infrastructure exists, where it is absent, and where it is insufficient relative to demand.
The tool maps formal and informal care services across health, childcare, eldercare, disability care, complex care and allied services at city, district, and community levels, creating a spatial lens of how care systems are built to function in practice, both within a business as usual context and with increased levels of climate induced stress.
Rather than treating care as a uniformly available ecosystem in cities and within a city, Care Infrastructure Mapping reveals demand–supply mismatches at a granular level, helping visualise the true State of Care, to inform planning, risk management and investment decisions. It facilitates early visualisation of the city's response readiness, where care infrastructure is likely to become inaccessible, overwhelmed, or non-functional during periods of heat stress, health shocks, extreme weather, or service disruption.
02
Why it is being developed?
Resilience has a spatial aspect. Households across a city or across a cluster of cities and towns, do not experience erosion of resilience the same way as others.
Cities do not fail uniformly. Care systems fail unevenly and spatially.
In many urban contexts, households face high care costs not because services do not exist, but because they are:
too far away,
poorly distributed,
overstretched,
or misaligned with the type of care required
These gaps translate directly into:
access penalties,
higher out-of-pocket expenditure,
increased unpaid care work,
and reduced resilience under climate and health stress.
Climate induced stress exacerbates this burden.
These failures are not random; they are shaped by location, service density, quality, and accessibility. Yet most planning, policy and investment decisions ignore this.
Care Infrastructure Mapping exists to make these structural gaps visible and actionable.
03
What it enables in the C² architecture?
Identification of care infrastructure gaps - Makes spatial mismatches between care demand and supply explicit and comparable, reveals where access and quality deficits drive higher care costs and stress.
Place-based planning and prioritisation - Supports targeted decisions at city, district, and community levels
Investment-ready spatial intelligence - Provides evidence for directing public, private and philanthropic funding decisions for long term resilience building by addressing care infrastructure gaps.
Identification of climate-sensitive care gaps - Reveals where care infrastructure is unable to absorb climate-induced surges in demand.
Place based resilience planning - Enables prioritisation of care infrastructure in communities facing substantial gaps and exposure to climate induced stress.
04
Current & Potential Use Cases
City governments & urban planners - Use mapping outputs to prioritise care service expansion, upgrade, or climate-proofing in neighbourhoods where access and quality penalties are highest, visualise demand supply mismatch to inform resource allocation decisions.
Public finance - Use spatial evidence to align capital budgets, gender responsive budgeting, social spending, scheme design and entitlements structuring, and climate adaptation investments with real care system gaps.
Development partners & DFIs - Use spatial evidence to ensure adaptation and social investments strengthen care systems where climate stress is most acute, validate investment logic and ensure financing responds to structural care deficits rather than symptoms.
Climate adaptation funds and initiatives - Use maps to integrate care response capacity into heat action plans, disaster preparedness, and resilience strategies.
06
Related Resources
explore resources we are developing, the practical building blocks behind the care-climate (C²) risk management and decision support architecture. These resources are developed through applied pilots and ongoing initiatives. Together, they translate care and climate (C²) dynamics into operational insight for finance, policy, and urban planning, resource allocation and governance systems.
Climate & Care (C²) Responsive Blended Finance Facility
Initiative
Design
A South Asia pilot initiative across India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal to design and test a care & climate (C²) responsive blended finance model, informed by household resilience insights and generating evidence for replication across emerging Asian economies.
