Community noise: a fundamental ingredient of an environmental health performance indicator (CHERIO)
Regular paper
RIVM
Monday 1 june, 2015, 11:40 - 12:00
0.8 Rome (118)
Abstract:
Various environmental factors can affect the health of the population in
communities. We developed an environmental health risk indicator, the
Cumulative health-based environmental risk indicator for outdoor pollutants
(CHERIO), to rank the local potential risk and to compare the consequences of
various policy alternatives. CHERIO is an indication of the environmental
quality in a given residential address from a health perspective. Noise from
transport and industrial sources, and air pollution (particulate matter and
nitrogen dioxide) are currently the fundamental ingredients of CHERIO. The
methodology to weight the varying health effects of these factors is based on
the global burden of disease concept which enables to express the health risks
of exposures in the same unit.
CHERIO scores of various environmental factors can be cumulated to identify
environmental health risk hot spots. The scores can be displayed on a map and
can easily be interpreted (for example by comparing them to the average CHERIO
in an area or by colour coding). CHERIO scores can also be summed and averaged
over populations, which makes it in potential possible to benchmark for
example municipalities nation-wide or agglomerations European-wide on their
cumulative environmental health risk performance, or on their performance for
underlying environmental factors (like total community noise or – source
specific- road traffic noise).
We foresee that health risks related to noise from wind farms, ground level
ozone, Extreme Low Frequency radiation (power lines) and heat stress can be
added to CHERIO in future. This paper will address the methodology of CHERIO
for community noise, illustrate CHERIO’s features by presenting some examples
of its (potential) use in different situations and discuss its opportunities
and limitations.