With funding for walking and cycling halved in the government’s recently published National Land Transport Programme and the transport emissions reduction plan weakened, the potential health benefits of a low-emission transport system have been severely reduced.

That’s a shame, because one of the great promises of low-carbon transport is the health benefits that can accompany certain policy choices. Health is tangible, while decarbonisation policies are often complex and highly technical. People care deeply about their health, both physical and mental.

However, we now face climate and transport policy options that will have radically different health consequences.

To investigate, we looked at two distinct future transport pathways outlined by the Climate Change Commission. We found that the choices New Zealand makes now will be crucial to improving people’s lives in the near future.

Transport and health

We already know that transport systems cause a wide range of illnesses and harms through air and noise pollution, physical inactivity and injuries. Cancer, asthma, heart disease, premature birth, depression and dementia are all linked to the effects of transport emissions.

It is difficult to accurately determine the impact of New Zealand’s current transport system on health. But we do know that it has a greater impact than tobacco, causing thousands of premature deaths each year and adding unnecessary burdens to overstretched health services.

These effects do not affect different parts of the population equally. For example, people on low incomes are more likely to die from road traffic injuries. We also know that people who drive the most (and have the greatest impact on the environment) tend to experience the fewest adverse health effects from transport.

Reducing emissions from transport involves a number of choices about how to decarbonise. For example, we can focus on electrifying vehicles, change urban design, or pursue a combination of both.

To explore the health implications of this phenomenon, our new research quantifies two possible transport pathways outlined in the Climate Change Commission’s 2021 recommendations to government entitled Ināia tonu nei: A low-carbon future for Aotearoa.

Behavior and technology

Focusing on population health, health system costs, health inequalities, and transportation greenhouse gas emissions, we modeled household travel across the two most distinct pathways to 2050. We then compared these with the current transportation system (as of 2018).

Both the ‘further behavioural change’ and ‘further technology change’ pathways involve increasing public transport and reducing the number of vehicle journeys per person by 2050. The behavioural pathway achieves the most in these areas and includes a significant increase in cycling.

Both paths require a transition to electric vehicles, but the technology path leads to a 100% electric car fleet by 2050, while the behavior-based path indicates 89%.

Compared to the 2018 transportation system, we found that both pathways would save lives, reduce health system costs, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the health gains were about two and a half times greater in the behavioral pathway than in the technology pathway (the health savings were three times greater).

This was primarily due to increased physical activity in this pathway. Reductions in life-cycle emissions (for example, from making and destroying a car, as well as from driving it) were fairly similar in both pathways.

Similar effects as in the case of tobacco reduction

We also modelled how the pathways would impact existing health inequalities. We found that the behavioural pathway could help reduce the gap in healthy life expectancy between Māori and non-Māori.

It depends on how the policy is implemented: the more equitable the transport system, the better for equity in access to health care.

The potential health benefits of changing behaviour are on the same scale as those resulting from tobacco market interventions such as a 10 per cent tax increase and raising a smoke-free generation.

These results are also quite conservative. The Climate Change Commission assumed only minimal changes in walking. But the policies needed to achieve this path are likely to increase walking significantly. And even the policies needed to achieve the technology path will increase walking.

Moreover, our model of health itself is conservative. For example, we know that the positive impact of the behavioral pathway on mental health would be much larger than we were able to model.

Health and honesty

These results also apply to the government’s emission reduction plans, which were published after the opinion of the Climate Change Committee.

The path of behavioral change is similar to the approach taken in the first emission reduction plan from 2022, so we can assume there will be comparable health effects. However, the approach in the draft of the second emission reduction plan, published this year, is radically different.

The new plan focuses on an emissions trading system (a pricing tool), an expansion of electric car charging infrastructure and several public transport projects (mainly in Auckland).

These policies are unlikely to have a large impact on land transport emissions. Nor will they achieve health benefits even with the technology pathway. Other transport policies—raising speed limits, expanding roads, and weakening vehicle emission standards—are likely to offset any potential benefits from the second emissions reduction plan, and also worsen health.

This study illustrates how important it is to choose to decarbonize transportation. It complements other local studies showing that switching to a “planet-friendly” diet would have major health, health equity, and climate benefits.

Together, these studies show how we can decarbonize in ways that significantly improve lives. And we can build support for climate policy by focusing on the things people really value, like health and justice.

This article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.