United Kingdom/Wales : affirming the value of walking on the Wales Coast Path

The Wales Coast Path (WCP) stretches for 1400 km around the coast of Wales. Natural Resources Wales (NRW) manages the path, and in 2013 it published a report on the economic impact of spending by visitors to the WCP.

The report concluded that the WCP generated approximately £16 million (or €18 million) of gross added value to the Welsh economy in 2013.

In 2014, NRW commissioned an analysis using WHO/Europe’s health economic assessment tool (HEAT) in order to make a more comprehensive assessment of the value of the path, including its health benefits. It also wanted to investigate the extent to which HEAT could be applied to a leisure setting.

Using data from counters on the path and user surveys for walkers, it estimated that 23 688 people walked on the path every week. On average, people walked 7 km per week spread over a mean of 1.6 visits per week.

HEAT calculated that this level of walking prevented 7 deaths per year among the walking population. The economic value of the health benefits of walking on the WCP was estimated at £18.3 million (or approximately €20 million) per year.

Interestingly, the user surveys of walkers also asked what people would have been doing had they not been able to walk on the path. Among the walkers questioned, 19% said that, without the path, they would not have walked at all. Therefore, £3.5 million (or approximately €4 million) of benefits per year can be directly attributed to the existence of the WCP.

A team member from NRW summarized that “overall, HEAT does seem to be a very suitable compromise between technical complexity and ease of use, and has been shown to be applicable to the situation of assessing the benefits of a coast path”.

Full details of the assessment are available below.