Noise

The Directive on Environmental Noise

Its four main objectives.

Further to the Commission proposal for a Directive relating to the assessment and management of Environmental noise (COM(2000)468), the European Parliament and Council have adopted Directive 2002/49/EC of 25 June 2002 whose main aim is to provide a common basis for tackling the noise problem across the EU. The underlying principles of this text, are similar to those for other overarching environment policy directives:

• Monitoring the environmental problem; by requiring competent authorities in Member States to draw up "strategic noise maps" for major roads, railways, airports and agglomerations, using harmonised noise indicators L_den (day-evening-night equivalent level) and L_night (night equivalent level). These maps will be used to assess the number of people annoyed and sleep-disturbed respectively throughout Europe
• Informing and consulting the public about noise exposure, its effects, and the measures considered to address noise, in line with the principles of the Aarhus Convention
• Addressing local noise issues by requiring competent authorities to draw up action plans to reduce noise where necessary and maintain environmental noise quality where it is good. The directive does not set any limit value, nor does it prescribe the measures to be used in the action plans, which remain at the discretion of the competent authorities.
• Developing a long-term EU strategy, which includes objectives to reduce the number of people affected by noise in the longer term, and provides a framework for developing existing Community policy on noise reduction from source. With this respect, the Commission has made a declaration  concerning the provisions laid down in article 1.2 with regard to the preparation of legislation relating to sources of noise.