WHO Environmental noise guidelines for the European Region - What is new? 1. Policy context and methodology used for guideline development

WHO Regional Office for Europe is currently coordinating the systematic review of all pertinent literature in order to provide recommendations for the protection of public health as part of the upcoming WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region (the Guidelines). The entire process is transparent and evidence-based and is...

WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region - What is new? 4. Implementation of guidelines and implications for practice

WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines focus on the WHO European Region and provide guidance to its Member States that is compatible with the noise indicators used in the EU Environmental Noise Directive. The Guidelines aim to serve as a reference for several target audiences, such as decision makers and technical experts, health impact assessment...

WHO environmental noise guidelines for the European Region - What is new? 2. New evidence on health effects from environmental noise and implications for research

The Guidelines include systematic reviews of the scientific evidence of the critical health effects of environmental noise: effects on sleep, annoyance, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular diseases, hearing impairment and tinnitus. Other potential health outcomes with less evidence are also systematically reviewed, but have less impact on the...

Future impact of road and railway noise

An exploratory study bas been undertaken to put into perspective future impact of road and railway noise until 2050 in The Netherlands, taking into account potential economic and mobitity growth, noise policy and legislation, demography and technical progress. Estimates were made of average noise levels and numbers of annoyed and sleep disturbed...

Practical ranges of loudness levels of various types of environmental noise, including traffic noise, aircraft noise, and industrial noise

In environmental noise control one commonly employs the A-weighted sound level as an approximate measure of the effect of noise on people. A measure that is more closely related to direct human perception of noise is the loudness level. At constant A-weighted sound level, the loudness level of a noise signal varies considerably with the shape of...

Comparison of noise impact indicators, calculated on the basis of noise maps of DENL

In this paper, the following four indicators describing noise annoyance in a community are considered: the percentage of people being highly annoyed (pHA), annoyed (pA), (at least) little annoyed (p LA), and the mean of the expected individual annoyance scores (m EA) in the population concerned. These indicators are calculated for a study...