Community Noise Exposure, Noise Annoyance and Human Health
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2025
Special Issue Editor
Interests: community noise; people's reactions to noise
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
People all over the world migrate to urban areas, and an increasing fraction of the world population experiences not only the benefits of urban life, but also the negative aspects such as increased exposure to noise pollution. In 2018, the World Health Organization published new environmental noise guidelines for the European region and recommended lower noise limits to avoid adverse health effects.
A prevalence of ten percent high annoyance in the population was considered by the WHO to be the acceptable limit. However, the term “highly annoyed” was not defined, and the WHO did not specify how this 10 %HA limit had been established. The International Standards Organization has recently revised the Technical Specification ISO/TS 15 666, which deals with the assessment of noise annoyance by means of social and socio-acoustic surveys. But again, high annoyance has not been uniquely defined.
In addition to the WHO, several other national regulatory authorities have issued their own recommended limits to avoid adverse noise-induced health effects. These limits may deviate substantially from each other. What is the rationale for these deviations?
In this Special Issue, we will attempt to establish a state-of-the art overview of the relationship between human health and exposure to environmental noise. Annoyance is the most prominent health effect. How can noise annoyance be uniquely defined? People’s annoyance with noise varies considerably. When does the annoyance represent an adverse health effect? How can annoyance be measured considering the effect of noise exposure only and avoiding the influence of non-acoustic factors? How can different noise situations be compared with respect to annoyance?
Papers addressing these and similar topics are invited for this Special Issue.
Dr. Truls T Gjestland
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- annoyance
- social surveys
- exposure-response functions
- non-acoustic factors
- exposure limits
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