The Five Pillars Index

A health-first measurement system for cities, societies, and systems

What is the Five Pillars Index?

Most indices measure outcomes — economic output, sector performance, or downstream health results. The Five Pillars Index measures conditions: the structural foundations that make healthy living possible in the first place.

It is a health-first measurement system designed to assess how well cities and societies support human wellbeing through the conditions of everyday life. Rather than focusing on growth or output, the Index evaluates five non-substitutable pillars that shape daily human experience: Nutrition, Movement, Knowledge, Mindset, and Environment.

By shifting attention from outcomes to underlying systems, the Index provides a structural explanation for why some places enable resilient, balanced lives — while others struggle despite wealth, efficiency, or technological advancement.

Why the Index exists

Modern societies face a paradox: unprecedented economic capacity alongside rising stress, chronic disease, burnout, loneliness, and environmental strain.

Traditional indicators such as GDP, productivity, or infrastructure investment capture activity, but not human sustainability. Existing wellbeing or livability indices often fragment reality into isolated metrics, obscuring the systemic nature of health.

The Five Pillars Index was created to address this blind spot.

Its core assumption is simple: health is not primarily a medical outcome — it is an emergent property of system design. When the foundations of daily life are weak, no amount of downstream intervention can fully compensate.

The Five Pillars

These five pillars were selected because they represent universal, daily, and non-substitutable conditions of human health: each is continuously experienced, structurally determined, and incapable of being offset by strength in another domain.

Nutrition

The food environment that sustains wellbeing. Assesses access, affordability, food safety, fast-food density, and nutrition literacy.

Movement

Daily mobility as a health engine. Captures walkability, transit accessibility, cycling infrastructure, commute time, and road safety.

Knowledge

The systems that enable learning, adaptation, and informed decision-making.
Includes education quality, digital access, public learning infrastructure, media and scientific literacy, and transparency.

Mindset

Psychological and social wellbeing in daily life. Measures stress, burnout, loneliness, social trust, work-life balance, and mental-health access.

Environment

The physical and structural foundation of daily health. Includes air quality, safety, sanitation, housing affordability, green space, and environmental reliability.

Together, the Five Pillars form a systems model of health capacity — shifting the focus from outcomes to underlying conditions.

How the Index works

The Five Pillars Index uses a transparent, indicator-based structure designed for comparability across contexts without false precision.

Each pillar is measured through a defined set of indicators.
Indicators are scored on a standardized scale reflecting insufficient, partial, or strong conditions.
Pillar scores are aggregated without weighting, reflecting the equal importance of each foundation.
The overall Index score reflects balance across pillars, not specialization.

This architecture enforces a core principle of the Index: structural balance matters more than isolated excellence.

What the Index reveals

Across applications, the Five Pillars Index consistently surfaces structural patterns that are difficult to see through conventional metrics:

Systems with strong economic performance can still underperform due to deficits in Mindset, Nutrition, or Movement.
Health capacity is driven less by peak performance in one domain and more by coherence across all five pillars.
Daily-life systems — mobility, food access, stress exposure — often exert more influence on wellbeing than formal healthcare capacity.
Structural weaknesses tend to cluster, revealing design trade-offs embedded in planning, policy, and governance choices.

These patterns shift the conversation from outcomes to root causes.

How the Index is intended to be used

The Five Pillars Index is not designed as a ranking for its own sake. It is a diagnostic and strategic tool.

Policymakers use it to identify binding constraints and misalignments between growth and wellbeing.
City governments use it to prioritize interventions where marginal impact is highest.
Urban planners and designers use it to understand how spatial and mobility decisions shape health capacity.
Researchers and institutions use it as a comparative framework for systemic analysis.

The value of the Index lies not in who scores highest, but in understanding which pillar limits progress — and why.

What the Index is not

To avoid misuse or over-interpretation:

The Five Pillars Index is not a happiness or satisfaction survey.
It is not a clinical or disease-based health index.
It is not a moral judgment of cities or societies.
It is not a predictive model.

It is a structural assessment of health-enabling conditions.

Stewardship and continuity

The Five Pillars Index is developed and stewarded by G.O.A.L. (Global Organization of Athletics & Life).

G.O.A.L. maintains the conceptual framework, methodological integrity, and long-term evolution of the Index, ensuring consistency across applications while allowing adaptation to different scales and contexts.

Annual editions apply the same underlying logic to specific domains — such as countries or cities — while preserving the Index’s core principles.