To most people, noise pollution is considered little more than an annoyance. Perhaps your neighbor plays their stereo too loud, or starts using their leaf blower at 5am - it’s irritating, perhaps you lose a little sleep, but that feels like the end of it.
But increasingly, scientific research shows that noise pollution can have real, serious, measurable negative effects on the health and wellbeing of the public.
Real harm
A 2019 review found that noise pollution:
interferes with communication, disturbs daily activities, and disrupts sleep, leading to mental stress
and that
Upon chronic exposure, stress responses […] lead to autonomic imbalance, oxidative stress, inflammation, and endothelial dysfunction, which then accelerates the development of cerebrocardiovascular risk factors and disease
In other words, when a temporary annoyance becomes a chronic source of stress, it may increase the risk of serious health complications such as heart disease and stroke.
In 2011, the World Health Organisation estimated that environmental noise caused the loss of
at least one million healthy life years […] every year
in Western Europe, primarily through annoyance and sleep disturbance causing stress and increased risk of disease. What’s worse, noise pollution tends to be more severe in more economically disadvantaged areas, which often have higher population densities and less effective enforcement of noise pollution standards.
And things are getting worse over time - a 2011 study from Sweden found that disturbances from noise pollution from sources like neighbours, road traffic, railways and aircraft increased substantially in the ten-year period between 1997 and 2007.
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