The World Health Organization has released a report showing inactivity will cost governments around the world US$300bn this decade unless swift action is taken

The World Health Organization (WHO) is leading the charge for physical activity with a new report – Global Status Report of Physical Activity 2022 – (see page 20) laying out in stark terms the cost of physical inactivity worldwide for the first time.

The report’s authors analysed data from 194 countries to see how closely they were adhering to WHO recommendations for physical activity and found only half had a national physical activity policy and less than 40 per cent had policies that were actually ‘operational’.

In addition to costing lives, this failure will cost governments around US$300bn this decade alone.

Also alarming is the projection that 500m people will develop preventable diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and cancer this decade as a result of their sedentary lifestyle.

In 2018, the WHO set out evidence-based policy to help countries increase levels of participation in its Global Action Plan on Physical Activity 2018–2030.

However, while carrying out research for the Global Status Report on Physical Activity, significant gaps in global data were still found to exist, making it difficult to track progress on important policy actions.

Dr Fiona Bull, head of WHO’s physical activity unit said; “What gets measured gets done and we have some way to go to comprehensively and robustly track national actions on physical activity.”

Although it’s important to track and analyse adherence to WHO guidelines, it’s also vital to share best practice and celebrate success and we’d like to see more of an emphasis on sharing knowledge gained by the nations which are ‘doing it right’.

Let’s look in depth at places where policies have been implemented, so we can understand what success looks like – and be inspired by it. It would be even more useful if we could put a monetary value on these successes.

It’s always hard to make a case for prevention –policymakers are notoriously blinkered when it comes to stopping things going wrong, mainly focusing their energies on election-winning moves to resolve existing crises that are visible enough to score political points with voters.

This new WHO report must lay the groundwork for data gathering that proves exercise delivers powerful preventative effects, to convince governments that investment in physical activity is money well spent.

If we can correlate this with GDP – as recent work by Deloitte China and the Global Health and Fitness Alliance has done – we will create a transformational set of data.

But ultimately our sector will only achieve its potential when it’s powered by consumer demand. To achieve this, we must educate children in self care from a young age, so they value exercise and demand lifelong access to it.