Abstract
An integrated environmental health impact assessment of road transport in New Zealand was carried out, using a rapid assessment. The disease and injury burden was assessed from traffic-related accidents, air pollution, noise and physical (in)activity, and impacts attributed back to modal source. In total, road transport was found to be responsible for 650 deaths in 2012 (2.1% of annual mortality): 308 from traffic accidents, 283 as a result of air pollution, and 59 from noise. Together with morbidity, these represent a total burden of disease of 26,610 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). An estimated 40 deaths and 1874 DALYs were avoided through active transport. Cars are responsible for about 52% of attributable deaths, but heavy goods vehicles (6% of vehicle kilometres travelled, vkt) accounted for 21% of deaths. Motorcycles (1 per cent of vkt) are implicated in nearly 8% of deaths. Overall, impacts of traffic-related air pollution and noise are low compared to other developed countries, but road accident rates are high. Results highlight the need for policies targeted at road accidents, and especially at heavy goods vehicles and motorcycles, along with more general action to reduce the reliance on private road transport. The study also provides a framework for national indicator development.
Highlights
In the modern, highly interconnected and technologically complex world, many of the issues faced by policy-makers are themselves interconnected and complex
In order to redress this deficiency, the EU-funded INTARESE and HEIMTSA projects developed the concept of integrated environmental health impact assessment (IEHIA) [4]
The findings presented above show that road transport has a marked effect on public health in New Zealand, accounting for a net annual toll of ca. 17,815 years of life lost, and an estimated
Summary
Highly interconnected and technologically complex world, many of the issues faced by policy-makers are themselves interconnected and complex. Assessing these problems, and devising suitable policy responses, faces many challenges and requires suitably expansive methods of analysis. A number of such assessments have been carried out, mainly focusing on systemic environmental issues such as climate change, energy technologies or regional land use change [1,2,3]. Few of these have been designed to assess impacts on human health. Building on the environmental burden of disease [5] approach, this aimed to assess policy issues by tracking all the relevant agents of impact, along all their main pathways from source to exposure, and thereby deriving estimates
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