Improving research on environmental noise pollution and its impact on the population in the context of sustainable development

Abstract

This paper aims to report on the improvement of the research carried out for official statistics on the exposure of the population to noise pollution in the context of sustainable development, considering new research paradigms emerging along with the expansion of the available data. This issue is vital, because the recipients’ expectations of the research concerning the environment and its impact on health, economics and social relations imply the need to develop useful research directions combining available resources of official statistics with new ready-to-use data obtained due to technological progress. The first part of the paper discusses the development of the research on noise pollution in the EU in the context of its impact on the population. Subsequently, changes in key population surveys, such as censuses, which enable their synergistic inclusion in environmental noise pollution research are analysed. The results of the pilot studies on the exposure of the population to noise in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, scheduled to be fully launched in 2024, are presented as a conclusion. This will also provide the basis for identifying prospects for the development of this research by official statistics services, incorporating new paradigms and sources of data into their scope of research.