every time you visit a national park, you save your health care budget almost $100

A visit to the national park is good for our health and well-being. But there are benefits are not shared equally throughout the community. Often, the people who need it most have the least access to a high-quality dose of nature.

We wanted to quantify the benefits to the health care system on a dollar-per-dollar basis. After all, health care budgets exist constantly growing while urban green spaces with high biodiversity are often degraded and compressed by development.

Our new research puts a dollar value on the health benefits of visiting national parks near the city of Adelaide in South Australia. We estimate that each visit saves your healthcare budget almost A$100 ($96).

Nationwide, this means 22 million one-day trips to national parks in 2019 could save more than $2.1 billion in the nation’s health care bills each year. These estimates assume that visits and benefits are similar across the country. Taking care of nature can pay off.

How did we estimate it?

Research so far shows that we spend time in nature can reduce stress, depression, anxiety, obesity, type II diabetes, heart and lung diseases. The health benefits of access to green spaces are often cited to support biodiversity conservation, especially in cities.

However, it is hard to calculate the economic value of these benefits. There is no data on the number of people who will benefit from this and it is hard to estimate how immense the benefit is. For example, how do you calculate a “dose” of urban greenery as a healing agent and measure the amount of health gained from a given dose?

To find out more, we examined the health benefits of access to nature in 20 national parks within 60 kilometers of central Adelaide in the 2018–19 financial year.

To find out how many people visited each park and how far they traveled to get there, we used de-identified cell phone “ping” data.

A ping occurs when one of the applications on your phone sends a message to the nearest phone station asking them to check for updates. We obtained app ping data for each of the 20 national parks, giving us a tally of 1.45 million visitors in 2018-19.

We combined ping data with information from a survey of over 1,000 visitors to the park on attitudes towards and exploit of South Australian parks. It was also linked to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s overall data on the health of the South Australian population.

We then estimated the health benefits of access to parks for citizens from different socioeconomic groups.

To determine this, we compared health assessment data from people who did or did not visit these parks. This showed that people who visit parks are significantly more likely to rate their health as “very good” or “excellent” compared to people who do not. We also looked at changes in the health of different socioeconomic groups.

We were able to check the differences in the health of people who responded to the survey. This gave us the result: the difference in positive self-reported health between park visitors and non-park visitors was between 2% and 5%.

We then used data from 2018-2019 on: cost of treatment ten categories of grave, long-term chronic diseases – such as diabetes, arthritis and cancer – to estimate savings in the health care budget.

How much good does a visit do?

During our study, we analyzed the health benefits of over 1.45 million visits to national parks.

We found that access to these green spaces could be worth $140 million a year in reduced health care costs. This equates to approximately 4% of South Australia’s total health budget.

Dividing $140 million by 1,453,271 visits equals $96 per visit.

Access to nature is not equal

We found that people living in lower socioeconomic areas had to travel about three times as far to visit a national park as people living in higher socioeconomic areas.

As a result, people from areas with lower socioeconomic status are less likely to visit national parks. We found that the number of visits from people from these areas was approximately 20% of the number of visits from people from areas with higher socioeconomic status.

This means that the share of health services available to people living in relatively disadvantaged areas is much lower. Health problems may have a greater financial impact on those who are relatively socioeconomically disadvantaged. Therefore, this group has the most to gain from increasing access to nature, with greater potential savings for the health budget.

Health and environmental spending

In total, Australia spent approx $241.3 billion for health goods and services in 2021-22. That averages out to about $9,365 per person. Health care costs, such as hospital expenses, continue to rise.

Spending on Commonwealth public hospitals alone is expected to enhance by $2 billion a year.

At the same time, expenses nature conservation accounts for less than 0.1% of the Commonwealth budget and falls low of Australians’ expectations. Almost all Australians (97%) want more action to prevent species extinction and more public investment to protect the environment and natural places (72%).

Our research shows that increasing access to nature by restoring urban biodiversity and increasing access to protected areas can bring benefits to citizens, governments and budgets.

Health benefits for everyone

To fully realize and share these benefits, we need better integrated budgets that take into account the benefits the natural world has on our health and the wider economy. This requires the ability to measure nature and exploit it in ways we haven’t been able to before.

Our research has sparked interest among policymakers in the recreation and well-being sectors. These sectors are becoming more and more apparent in the market national leveland also in South Australia when it comes to valuation national parks and wildlife services.

As we better understand the connections between nature and health outcomes, we have a better chance of investing well and equitably so that everyone can benefit from improved physical and mental health.