The WHO Guidelines for Environmental Noise

• Dietrich Schwela

In this paper, a brief overview is given on the global WHO Guidelines for Community Noise, published by the World Health Organization in 1999, the Night Noise Guidelines for Europe, published in 2009, and the Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region, published in 2018. Environmental noise is considered as an increasing problem for public health, in developed as in developing countries. The main objective of these WHO guideline documents is to provide evidence-based recommendations for the protection of human health from exposure to environmental noise. The paper highlights the main topics of the WHO guideline documents with respect to noise sources such as transportation (road traffic, railway, and aircraft) noise, residential noise, leisure noise, noise in special-to-be-protected areas (schools, hospitals, retirement homes), noise from toys, electronic devices, and wind turbines. The recommendations provide robust public health advice to drive policy action that will protect people from the adverse effects of environmental noise. In this author’s opinion, the three documents are complementary. Moreover, the joint application of the guideline documents of 1999 and 2018 are considered more helpful for designing actions in environmental noise management in countries outside the European Union.