Health co-benefits of climate change mitigation policies in the transport sector

Smartphone Apps for Measuring Human Health and Climate Change Co-Benefits: A Comparison and Quality Rating of Available Apps

“…It is estimated that transport accounts for approximately 22% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions due to increased reliance on motorized transport within both developed and developing countries [11-14]. While motorized transport may be time-efficient in the modern world, it contributes to the problem of physical inactivity and sedentary behavior, which have been identified as major behavioral risk factors contributing to many NCDs and their determinants, causing approximately 3.2 million deaths per year [3,4].…”

“…The World Health Organization predicts that 7.7% of the total mortality risk within high income countries is attributed to physical inactivity alone, with a further 8.4% associated with being overweight or obese [15]. However, the prevalence of physical inactivity and the associated burden of chronic disease could be lowered with small changes to individual travel behavior, such as reduced vehicle use and increased active travel (ie, walking or cycling) within urban areas [5,7,12-14,16-18]. Such changes also reduce the impact of climate change by lowering GHG emissions.…”

“…To date, studies of ways to reduce GHG emissions within transport and agricultural sectors have mainly focused on high-level modulations of potential policy changes [5,6,12,14,16] or technological and managerial approaches such as improving productivity, restoring soil carbon, optimizing nutrient use and fertilizers, improving livestock diets, and better management of waste [10,19,20]. However, little research has been done to examine the ways in which personal behavior affects both GHG emissions and the incidence of NCDs [17,19,23].…”

“…However, little research has been done to examine the ways in which personal behavior affects both GHG emissions and the incidence of NCDs [17,19,23]. Although at the individual level the net effect of changing lifestyles (eg, changing 2 daily commutes per week from driving to cycling) might be relatively small, the impact at the population level could be substantial [14,16]. For example, studies show that if 10% of Canadians who are currently inactive or sedentary swap to active commuting by walking instead of driving and sit less, it could result in cost savings to the health care system of CaD $2.6 billion (US $2.0 billion) by 2040 and a cumulative CaD $7.5 billion (US $5.7 billion) boost to the Canadian gross domestic product [24].…”

Increasing active travel: results of a quasi-experimental study of an intervention to encourage walking and cycling

“…On the basis of observational studies, it appears likely that there will be health and environmental benefits from policies that increase active travel,11 12 but there have been few studies that rigorously evaluated such interventions. In general, these have found only moderate changes in travel behaviours following the interventions 13.…”