ANIMA D2.11: recommendations from exemplification case studies summary and implications for BP dissemination

This study presents the analysis of seven airport exemplification case studies undertaken in the European project “Aviation Noise Impact Management through Novel Approaches – ANIMA”. Best practices related to aircraft noise management at airports in individual airport contexts were implemented and evaluated. Case studies on communication and community engagement in airport noise management were investigated at Heathrow (United Kingdom), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Rotterdam The Hague (The Netherlands) airports. For Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine) and Iasi (Romania) airports, the implementation of interventions related to land use planning was examined. The interdependencies between noise and emissions were studied for the airport at Cluj (Romania) along with an exploration of key Quality of Life issues. All case studies were performed under the scope of the corresponding national legislation and guidelines. Individual characteristics of airport operations were taken into account. The case studies were aligned with expectations and priorities of all involved stakeholders, such as representatives of airport operators, local communities, civil aviation authorities and policy makers. The efficacy of the noise management case studies was assessed in terms of the capacity to negotiate consensus outcomes, the extent to which noise impact reductions were achieved, and the participants’ satisfaction with the process and outcomes. The case studies revealed the vital importance of community engagement in noise management if decisions are to be accepted and outcomes valued. In general, the earlier this engagement starts in the process of decision-making and implementation the better; although care needs to be taken in the selection of methods of engagement to ensure the tools used are appropriate to the engagement and communication task faced. In this way, overly long engagement should be avoided and with that the risk of increased uncertainty in outcomes. Such engagement should also ensure that decisions and subsequent interventions are tailored to local community concerns reflecting national, regional and cultural differences across Europe

Early environmental quality and life-course mental health effects: The Equal-Life project.

Background: There is increasing evidence that a complex interplay of factors within environments in which children grows up, contributes to children's suboptimal mental health and cognitive development. The concept of the life-course exposome helps to study the impact of the physical and social environment, including social inequities, on cognitive development and mental health over time. Methods: Equal-Life develops and tests combined exposures and their effects on children's mental health and cognitive development. Data from eight birth-cohorts and three school studies (N = 240.000) linked to exposure data, will provide insights and policy guidance into aspects of physical and social exposures hitherto untapped, at different scale levels and timeframes, while accounting for social inequities. Reasoning from the outcome point of view, relevant stakeholders participate in the formulation and validation of research questions, and in the formulation of environmental hazards. Exposure assessment combines GIS-based environmental indicators with omics approaches and new data sources, forming the early-life exposome. Statistical tools integrate data at different spatial and temporal granularity and combine exploratory machine learning models with hypothesis-driven causal modeling. Conclusions: Equal-Life contributes to the development and utilization of the exposome concept by (1) integrating the internal, physical and social exposomes, (2) studying a distinct set of life-course effects on a child's development and mental health (3) characterizing the child's environment at different developmental stages and in different activity spaces, (4) looking at supportive environments for child development, rather than merely pollutants, and (5) combining physical, social indicators with novel effect markers and using new data sources describing child activity patterns and environments

Slovenian Standardised Noise Reaction Questions for Community Noise Surveys

Two standardized annoyance reaction questions for community noise surveys and a corresponding verbal response scale has been translated into the Slovenian language according to ICBEN protocol. The modifiers for the verbal scale were selected through a web-based questionnaire. It is recommended that these questions and the corresponding response scales are included in all future social surveys on noise annoyance in Slovenia, so that new survey results can be readily compared with similar studies conducted elsewhere on the international scene.acceptedVersio

Environmental noise and cardiovascular disease in adults: Research in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and Newly Independent States

The adverse effects of noise on health have been intensely explored in the previous fifty years. However, the scope of research conducted in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), South-East Europe (SEE) and Newly Independent States (NIS) is not well-known. The aim of this review is to present studies on cardiovascular effects of environmental noise in adults published since 1965 and to point out the most important issues that need to be addressed in the future. More than 100 papers on noise and health and about 20 papers on cardiovascular effects of environmental noise in adults were identified by literature search. The authors reviewed scientific international and local journals, conference proceedings and local reports published in national languages. The major endpoints were high blood pressure, ischemic heart disease, and myocardial infarction. The target populations were adults. Experimental and exposure assessment studies, field, empirical studies, social surveys and epidemiological studies are presented. The major sources of environmental noise were road and air traffic. The results were presented in tables and the most relevant articles were briefly discussed. The importance of this review is that it refers to some countries that no longer exist in the same political and governmental systems. The fact that this review includes publications that are not mentioned in any other previous systematic reviews maybe considered its strength. Strategies for future noise-related research on national and global level are proposed.JRC.I.1-Chemical Assessment and Testin

Environmental noise and cardiovascular disease in adults: Research in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and Newly Independent States

The adverse effects of noise on health have been intensely explored in the past 50 years. However, the scope of research conducted in the Central and Eastern Europe, South-East Europe, and Newly Independent States is not well-known. The aim of this review was to present studies on cardiovascular effects of environmental noise in adults published since 1965 and to point out the most important issues that need to be addressed in the future. More than 100 papers on noise and health and about 20 papers on cardiovascular effects of environmental noise in adults were identified by literature search. The authors reviewed scientific international and local journals, conference proceedings, and local reports published in national languages. The major endpoints were high blood pressure, ischemic heart disease, and myocardial infarction. The target populations were adults. Experimental and exposure-assessment studies, field, empirical studies, social surveys, and epidemiological studies are presented. The major sources of environmental noise were road and air traffic. The results were presented in tables and the most relevant articles were briefly discussed. The importance of this review is that it refers to some countries that no longer exist in the same political and governmental systems. The strength of this paper is that it includes publications that were not evaluated in earlier systematic reviews. Strategies for future noise-related research on national and global level are proposed

A Strategy to Reduce the Use of Fish in Acute Ecotoxicity Testing of New Chemichals Substances Notified in the European Union

This study explores the applicability of a fish acute threshold (step-down) test approach for the assessment of new chemical substances notified in the EU. The proposed approach basically implies replacing the fish LC50 toxicity test with a simple acute threshold test and thus reducing the number of fish used and also costs. The fish test would be performed only at one concentration, the lowest between the EC50 concentrations obtained with previous testing with algae and daphnia. When fish would be more sensitive than algae and daphnia, testing with fish would be continued at lower concentrations (step-down). From step-down test results the LC50 value can be obtained by applying the binominal method of interpolation. These data can be used together with algal and daphnid data to provide the same Predicted No Effect Concentration values. The acute aquatic toxicity data used in this evaluation were extracted from the New Chemicals Database of the European Chemicals Bureau. The results show that 53.6–71.2% reduction of the number of fish used would be possible when applying this new testing strategy and suggest its use for regulatory purposes.JRC.I.2-Validation of biomedical testing method

Dynamic noise maps for Ljubljana airport

Trabajo presentado en los 10th SESAR Innovation Days, celebrado online del 7 al 10 de diciembre de 2020.The main purpose of this research is to assess the impact of aircraft noise around an airport considering spatial and temporal variations in the population. The concept of dynamic airport noise mapping has been demonstrated on Ljubljana airport case study. Detailed population mobility information for Slovenia were retrieved from a survey. The hourly noise contour levels generated by the airport's departure and arrival operations were calculated, and the annoyed population was thus estimated considering a reference scenario, where only the residential area was taken into account, and also a dynamic one, in which the population's mobility was included. The results show that for the dynamic scenario, the total number of people annoyed by noise increases by 2.9%, while the number of highly annoyed people decreases by 10% compared to the reference scenario. On the individual level, there are many cases of both overestimating and underestimating the noise impact. Since so far the standard in airport noise mapping has been to use census data, we have shown the importance of including explicit population mobility in noise impact calculations.This work has been achieved in ANIMA, a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreementNo 769627. This research wasalsosupported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia. T.L and J.J.R. acknowledge funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the AEI and FEDER (EU) under the grant PACSS (RTI2018-093732-B-C22) and the Maria de Maeztu program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711).Peer reviewe

Optimizing the aquatic toxicity assessment under REACH through an integrated testing strategy (ITS).

To satisfy REACH requirements a high number of data on chemical of interest should be supplied to the European Chemicals Agency. To organize the various kinds of information and help the registrants to choose the best strategy to obtain the needed information limiting at the minimum the use of animal testing, integrated testing strategies (ITSs) schemes can be used. The present work deals with regulatory data requirements for assessing the hazards of chemicals to the aquatic pelagic environment. We present an ITS scheme for organizing and using the complex existing data available for aquatic toxicity assessment. An ITS to optimize the choice of the correct prediction strategy for aquatic pelagic toxicity is described. All existing information (like physico-chemical information), and all the alternative methods (like in silico, in vitro or the acute-to-chronic ratio) are considered. Moreover the weight of evidence approach to combine the available data is included

QSAR investigation of a Large Data Set for Fish, Algae and Daphnia Toxicity

A large dataset containing values for fish, algae and Daphnia toxicity for more than 2000 chemical compounds and mixtures was investigated. The dataset was taken from the New Chemicals Data Base of the European Union [provided by the European Chemicals Bureau, Institute for Health and Consumer Protection (http://ecb.jrc.it)]. The data are collected from industry, according to requirements of the EU Council Directive 67/548/EEC as amended for the seventh time by the EU Council Directive 92/32/EEC. The toxicity of neural compounds, salts, metal complexes, as well as compound mixtures has been recorded. A baseline effect is demonstrated by compounds known to act by narcotic mechanisms of action i.e. a relationship is observed between the toxicity and the logarithm of the octanol-water partition coefficient (log P). Prediction of the toxicity of more reactive compounds requires the use of further descriptors.JRC.I.2-Validation of biomedical testing method

Community response to noise: Research in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and Newly Independent States

The systems of public complaints on environmental noise were reviewed in seven countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), South-East Europe (SEE), and Newly Independent States (NIS). Public complaints remain an important issue due to differences in public sensitivity to noise and due to several cases where a measurement of noise intensity does not give a satisfying solution to the problem. The unresolved problem remaining in the residential neighborhoods is the noise from pubs and restaurants that are open until late in the night. In our review, we compiled information on the institutions responsible for the implementation of environmental noise legislation and organizations that are responsible for dealing with public complaints. Information on activities for increasing public awareness on hazards rising from environmental noise and the role of civil initiative was explored. In seven countries, and among them, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, and Poland, the responsibilities and duties are shared among different institutions at national and regional levels, depending on the noise source. The problem of gathering information on complaints and using it for improving the wellbeing and health of citizens remains often difficult and unsolved