The World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed noise pollution the second largest environmental cause of ill-health, after air pollution. But is noise pollution really as harmful as the headlines make it seem?
This is a summary of an article which was originally posted on our blog about how acoustics and noise pollution affect health and wellbeing.
What do we mean by environmental noise? The body of research looking at the effects of noise on physical and mental health and cognition has typically focussed on the effects of transport noise; that is to say, noise from aeroplanes, trains and road vehicles. More recently, and of growing interest, there have been some studies on the effects of wind-turbine noise on health and well-being.
In 2011, The World Health Organization (WHO) published a report titled “Burden of disease from environmental noise” (1) which attempted to quantify the problem of environmental noise in direct, measureable impacts. The authors estimated that, in Western European countries, at least one million healthy life-years are lost every year because of environmental noise (from a population of about 340 milllion).
A number of studies have shown that increased exposure to noise can result in annoyance, stress and lower quality sleep (2), all of which are accepted, broadly speaking, to be bad for your health. See (Mayo Clinic).
The best assumption we can make at the moment is that the negative associations of air, road and rail noise and the resulting emotional response cause an emotional and physiological reaction, in the same way that stress has been shown to. After all, if it was about a purely physical phenomenon of sound waves striking us, then we would see similar effects on people attending loud concerts, nightclubs, or social gatherings, and I would bet my bottom dollar those people are broadly benefitting from the social and emotional interactions around them (risk of hearing damage aside).
There is a clear link between exposure to environmental noise at school and cognitive impairments (usually measured in terms of reading age). The good news is that it looks like these effects can be reversed, if the source of the noise is removed, the noise levels are reduced, or the child is placed in a different environment. Below, I’ve summarised two well-known studies which looked at the impact of environmental noise on children’s cognition and learning.
Is noise bad for my sleep?
Intuitively, the answer is a resounding, “Yes.” If you think back to a time when you were woken up by a fox calling, or kept awake by neighbours playing dance music until the early hours; if you have lived at all, you will know that noise wakes us up, noise keeps us up and noise diminishes the quality of our sleep.
Conclusions
It’s clear that high levels of transport noise are already having a detrimental impact on our health and well-being, but it’s important that we continue to undertake research to better understand the range and severity of impacts, if we are to work towards mitigating them. There is also a clear need for more research into the effects of noise from wind turbines and drones on human health and well-being.
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