{"id":20349,"date":"2020-07-03T11:47:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-03T08:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/taking-the-measure-of-noise-pollution-during-covid-lockdown\/"},"modified":"2020-07-03T11:47:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-03T08:47:00","slug":"taking-the-measure-of-noise-pollution-during-covid-lockdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/taking-the-measure-of-noise-pollution-during-covid-lockdown\/","title":{"rendered":"#Taking the measure of noise pollution during COVID lockdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Taking the measure of noise pollution during COVID lockdown<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\"Toulouse\"<\/img>
\n Credit: Pixabay\/CC0 Public Domain
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Samuel Challeat was riding his bike in the city of Toulouse in the hours before France’s strict COVID-19 lockdown took hold when the thought came to him.<\/p>\n

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What impact will confinement have on the urban sound environment, and how could it be measured, he wondered.<\/p>\n

That same day, Challeat, a geographer at the University of Toulouse II, launched an app<\/a>eal to scientists and researchers around the world to measure the “unique perturbation” of city sounds during confinement.
\nThe project, called Silent Cities, was up and running within 48 hours, and now has more than 350 participants in 40 countries around the world, including France, the United States, India and Brazil, Challeat told AFP in an interview.
\nParticipants captured ambient sound\u2014recording one out of every 10 minutes\u2014and uploading the data into an open-source database.
\nBecause the project is open-source, anyone can access the data and the sound files for free.
\nThe World Health Organization (WHO) has tagged noise pollution as the second most dangerous environmental risk factor for humans after air pollution.
\nOne in five Europeans is exposed to long-term noise pollution that is harmful to health, according to the European Environment Agency.
\nConfinement was the perfect natural experiment for establishing a baseline for noise pollution in cities, according to Jerome Sueur, a bioacoustician at Paris’s natural history museum.
\nSilent cities<\/b>
\n“It showed us to what extent we are in a noisy environment and allows us to quantify that,” he said.
\nSueur set up sound measurement instruments called magnetometers in Paris and Cachan, the suburb where he lives, as part of the Silent Cities project.
\nIn mid-June, the magnetometer in the gardens of Paris’s natural history museum had made more than 8,000 recordings and amassed 50 gigabytes of data, he said.
\nDuring confinement, noise was drastically reduced across the board in the French capital.
\nEnvironmental sound pollution dropped by as much as 90 percent in some areas of Paris during confinement, according to Fanny Mietlicki, the executive director of BruitParif, an organisation that measures urban noise pollution.
\n“It was an unprecedented situation over this long of a time period,” she told AFP.
\nUnhealthy noise levels<\/b>
\nAs car, rail and air traffic slowed nearly to a halt, BruitParif’s sound map of the Paris region\u2014typically red to indicate high-levels of noise pollution\u2014suddenly became green.
\nNoise pollution from automobile and train traffic alone costs the European Union\u2014in degraded health, lost productivity, and other impacts\u2014some 40 billion euros per year, according to a 2011 European Commission report.
\nCompared to air pollution, “noise seems to have a larger impact on indicators related to quality of life, and on mental health and well-being,” said Eulalia Peris, the European Environment Agency’s environmental noise expert.
\nParis was the world’s third most noise-polluted city, according to a 2017 report compiled by the WHO and Norwegian-based technology<\/a> research group SINTEF.
\nThe research also showed a tight statistical link between urban noise pollution and hearing loss.
\nWhether or not peace-and-quiet had positive effects on people is hard to say, Mietlicki cautioned.
\n“Not everyone had the same conditions of confinement,” she said.
\nChalleat and his colleagues plan to publish a dataset paper at the end of the summer, and are currently seeking funding to extend the project into 2021 to measure noise pollution levels year-on-year, Challeat said.
\nThis, he added, would be critical in showing just how unique the COVID-confinement moment was.
\n“We have grown accustomed to unhealthy noise levels in cities,” said Peris, at EEA.
\n“Due to the drop in noise as a result of the lockdown, maybe people will start to realise that cities can be a lot quieter and more peaceful.”
\nBut a two- to three-month reduction in noise pollution during confinement most likely wouldn’t have an effect on health, she cautioned.
\n“It requires societal change,” she said.<\/p>\n

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\n \u00a9 2020 AFP<\/p>\n

\n Citation<\/strong>:
\n Taking the measure of noise pollution during COVID lockdown (2020, July 3)
\n retrieved 3 July 2020
\n from https:\/\/phys.org\/news<\/a>\/2020-07-noise-pollution-covid-lockdown.html<\/p>\n

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“#Taking the measure of noise pollution during COVID lockdown” Credit: Pixabay\/CC0 Public Domain Samuel Challeat was riding his bike in the city of Toulouse in the hours before France’s strict COVID-19 lockdown took hold when the thought came to him. What impact will confinement have on the urban sound environment, and how could it be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[10628,32428],"class_list":["post-20349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sciencee","tag-ecology","tag-taking-the-measure-of-noise-pollution-during-covid-lockdown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}