Combined health impact assessment of noise and air quality in urban agglomerations ETC/ACM Technical Paper 2017/12
16 Apr 2018
Iulian Petchesi
An explorative study
The main findings are:
- The combined health impact of road traffic noise and air pollution in agglomerations is, on average, 1,745 DALYs per year per 100.000 inhabitants. This corresponds with 6.2% of the total burden of disease for all causes per year.
- Particulate air pollution contributes, on average, for 45% to the total impact, followed by nitrogen dioxide with 33%. Road traffic noise is associated with 21% and ozone with 2% of the combined burden of disease by road traffic noise and air pollution.
- There is a 7 to 9 fold difference in the health impact between the highest and lowest ranked agglomeration. This difference indicate that there is ample room for improvement of the health of citizens in European agglomerations by policy measures aiming at further reduction of road traffic noise and air pollution.
- Several points of improvements were identified in this explorative health impact assessment for road traffic noise and air pollution.
Prepared by: ETC/ACM members Danny Houthuijs and Frank de Leeuw of the ETC/ACM Consortium partner National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), The Netherlands.
Published by: ETC/ACM, April 2018, 47 pp.
Download: Detailed data on all agglomerations of study (280kb; in extension to Table 6 of the paper).
