Health implication of road, railway and aircraft noise in the European Union : Provisional results based on the 2nd round of noise mapping

Abstract

This report describes, on request of the European Commission, the health and well-being implications of road traffic, railway and aircraft noise in Europe. The emphasis is on the description of the methods for health impact assessment of environmental noise. Exposure data for 2012 is available only for a selection of agglomerations, major roads, major railways and major airports and includes only levels above 55 dB Lden and 50 dB Lnight. The methods can be used in a later stage to assess the full impact in the European Union when complete information about the noise exposure distribution for these sources becomes available. At least about 19.8 million adults in Europe are annoyed by noise from road traffic, railways, aircrafts or industry; 9.1 million of them are highly annoyed. It is estimated that 7.9 million adults have sleep disturbance due to night time noise; 3.7 million of them are severely sleep disturbed. The exposure contributes to about 910 thousand additional prevalent cases of hypertension and to 43 thousand hospital admissions per year and about 10 thousand premature deaths per year related to coronary heart disease and stroke. About 90% of the disease burden is related to road traffic noise. These results for 33 European countries (EU28 plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey) should be considered provisionally, since they are based on the available data (database of August 2013). In this database the completeness for road traffic noise - the most dominant source - is 36% for major roads and 62% for major agglomerations.