Noise and Health 
Evidence from Ireland

​​Our Objective
To identify and assess the noise-health relationship in an international and national context and identify policy recommendations and integration pathways for considering noise in various strands of public policy.

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What we know
It is now well established that excessive environmental noise disturbs sleep and is a public health concern. If the disturbance is at a level that is severe enough, it can lead to sleep deprivation which can seriously affect the physical and mental health of an individual (Murphy and King, 2014).

The WHO (2011) estimate that 90,300 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in populations greater than 50,000 are lost to sleep disturbance as a result of environmental noise exposure in the EU. The European Environment Agency (EEA) estimates that almost 20 million adults are annoyed and a further 8 million suffer sleep disturbance due to environmental noise (EEA, 2014). The WHO’s seminal Burden of Disease from Environmental Noise study concludes that one in three individuals in Europe is annoyed during the daytime and one in five has disturbed sleep at night and that is from traffic noise alone.

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 What we are doing
The overall aim of the Noise-Health project is to provide an evidence-base for understanding the risk to public health from population exposure to environmental noise from transportation sources. The research will address the concepts of the noise-stress relationship, dose-effect relationships, and health-promoting environments in cities as a means to inform policy and practice improving population health and well-being.

The project aims to contribute to a range of international and national policy areas, creating a positive feedback loop between policies for transport, land use/spatial planning, and environmental health promotion.

Internationally, the research will contribute to improving the implementation of the Environmental Noise Directive (European Commission, 2002) by outlining an approach for linking noise modelling and health data.​

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 How we are doing it
The specific objectives of the study include:

1. To provide a state of knowledge review of relationship between environmental noise and health/well-being.
2. To combine noise modelling and health microdata to examine causal relationships between noise exposure and health and well-being outcomes at the city-wide scale for Dublin and Cork.
3. To determine local noise-health hotspots in Dublin and Cork.
4. To provide a national estimate of the burden of disease from environmental noise in DALYs.
5. To develop recommendations and guidelines for the integration of noise considerations into relevant policy streams.
6. To build capacity, knowledge and awareness among key professional stakeholders of the relationship between environmental noise from transport and health and well-being.

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