Resources

The State Public Health Plan 2019-2024 (PDF 1MB), establishes a new and aspirational vision for a healthy, liveable and connected community for all South Australians. This vision is supported by four strategic priorities, under the headings of the public health approaches of promote, protect, prevent and progress.

The Plan provides a framework to work together to take early action to protect health, prevent illness and promote physical and mental health and wellbeing for all South Australians.

Physical inactivity is one of the top 10 risk factors contributing to disease in Australia, contributing to 2.5% of the total burden of disease and is the 5th highest behavioural risk factor, behind tobacco use, diet, alcohol and illicit drug use.

SPARC's Active New Zealand Survey (ANZS) is a high-quality nationwide survey of over 4000 adults collected through face-to-face interviews over 12 months in 2007/08. Although collected mainly to measure levels of sport/recreation activity and to quantify physical activity in general, it includes data of interest to the transport sector on walking and cycling.

This report uses the ANZS data to meet the following transport-related objectives:

• quantifying how much walking/cycling by New Zealand adults is done mainly for transport purposes compared with sport/recreation purposes
• quantifying the proportion of New Zealand adults meeting key health guideline for physical activity through active transport alone, and the proportion for whom active transport makes a clear contribution to them meeting such guidelines
• establishing whether SPARC's ANZS and the Ministry of Transport's NZ Household Travel Survey deliver broadly comparable estimates of transport-related walking and cycling
• recommending refinements to collection, analysis, and interpretation of transport and physical activity/health data for the benefit of both sectors.

This report seeks to provide a per-kilometre value for the health benefits of active transport modes (such as walking and cycling) that is compatible with the Land Transport New Zealand Economic Evaluation Manual Volume 2 (EEM2). The first two sections of the report begin by explaining the scope of the project and the background. Section 3 investigates the evidence of the connection between physical activity and health outcomes. Section 4 clarifies the role of active transport modes as physical activity, and reports the New Zealand-specific data about active transport mode engagement. Section 5 gives a brief comparative summary of the literature review of cost-benefit analyses and valuation techniques used overseas to value the health benefits of active modes. This report uses population attributable fractions (PAF) to estimate the annual burden of mortality and morbidity costs per inactive adult. Annual estimates of the costs of inactivity are applied to the New Zealand adult population using a weighted sum to establish a per-kilometre value for each mode. The valuation presented in this report is limited by a poverty of data, but the final values are considered to be a reasonable estimate of the health benefits of active modes. While further research is recommended to obtain more precise estimates of the costs of inactivity in New Zealand, it is considered that the values presented in this report are a sound interim estimate for inclusion in the EEM2.

This guidance is to help transport planners, business case writers and anyone involved in transport investment understand the Land Transport Benefits Framework and how to use benefits management in their work.

The Move more, sit less campaign aims to raise awareness of the benefits of regular physical activity and minimising sedentary behaviour.