The coronavirus crisis had an unexpected side effect: The pandemic quietened what’s normally a very noisy continent.
Lockdowns stilled factories, kept commuters at home and grounded air travel — so for the first time in decades Europe experienced weeks of quiet.
“As a result of COVID-19 lockdowns, something unique has happened: Many people now know quiet,” said acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who travels the globe in search of vanishing sounds, including the most endangered of all — silence.
In the first weeks of the lockdowns, seismologists measuring the vibrations of the Earth to detect earthquakes and erupting volcanoes reported that human-generated noise underwent the most severe and sustained drop in recorded history.
Another study suggested that birds started to sing more quietly, simply because they no longer had to compete sonically with airplane engines to defend their territories and attract mates.
Eulalia Peris, noise pollution expert at the European Environment Agency (EEA), said that one effect of the lockdowns was “the discovery by many people of quiet streets and neighborhoods,” leading to a renewed appreciation of quietness.
Hempton said that previously when he would talk with people about adding areas to the Quiet Parks International network, which aims to certify and protect the Earth’s natural soundscapes, the big question was: Why is quiet so important?
“Nobody asks us that anymore,” he said, adding that “anybody who asks why quiet is important is a person who has not experienced quiet.”
The brief interlude of quiet is already fading after the Continent reopened over the summer. During the second wave of the pandemic there’s more air and car travel, and factories are open. Reports suggest that highly populated cities like Brussels went back to the same levels of noise pollution after the initial lockdown measures were loosened.
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Constant noise
Those short-lived sounds of silence underscored the problems that a noisy environment causes for people and animals.
At least one in five people in the EU live in an area where traffic noise levels are harmful to health, according to the EEA. That puts 100 million Europeans at a heightened risk of a slew of health issues, such as heart attacks and mental health problems.
There’s no definitive data quantifying the change in noise levels across Europe, but air traffic has tripled since the 1980s. The number of cars per 1,000 people has risen from 411 in 2000 to 516 in 2017 — and the growth in Central Europe is even faster thanks to that region’s rapid economic growth, according to the EEA.
Only 18 percent of the areas outside cities can be considered quiet, according to a report from the EEA. The number of quiet areas in the Netherlands has been drastically cut over the past decade, according to research from newspaper de Volkskrant.
Large and sparsely populated countries such as Finland and Sweden have the highest proportion of quiet areas, while the noisiest areas tend to be found in highly urbanized and densely populated countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands.
One of the biggest problems is traffic noise, Peris said. “We have grown accustomed to unhealthy noise levels in cities,” she said, adding that chronic exposure to noise can result in disturbances to sleep and well-being, as well as high blood pressure and even strokes.
The EEA estimated that long-term exposure to noise like busy traffic, railways and aircraft causes 12,000 premature deaths every year in Europe. In addition, 6.5 million Europeans suffer from chronic sleep disturbance because of the noisy environments they live in.
Not only humans are affected by the lack of silence.
“Man-made sound is a silent killer,” said Hempton. “Wildlife cannot exist in noisy places.”
Hempton has been recording endangered natural soundscapes around the world for almost 40 years. “Without knowing the species you’re listening to, you can hear whether or not it’s a healthy ecosystem,” he said. “In a healthy ecosystem there’s something that’s called a soundscape pyramid,” which reflects the different frequencies on which organisms — from simple plants to apex predators at the top of the food chain — communicate with each other.
Recording ecosystems over the years, Hempton found that many organisms were out of tune. “Even low sources of noise pollution can determine whether or not a prey is able to detect and escape an approaching predator, and it will determine whether or not birds’ song can travel over a large enough area to create a food-base territory,” Hempton said.
“When we go to the very few quiet places that are left on Earth, we find incredible biodiversity,” he said, adding that thanks to this biodiversity and overall better environmental health, those ecosystems also sequester more carbon. “Those few remaining quiet places are saving our world.”
Protecting silence
The EU’s Environmental Noise Directive requires countries to publish noise maps and management action plans every five years, but shies away from setting any limits or target values.
That’s why Peris said it would be “helpful” to define common reduction goals.
“Unlike climate change, where we have agreed to a reduction target — for noise pollution, there is not really a clear objective or environmental action that countries, regions and cities can move toward,” she said.
Most importantly, however, is prevention. “It seems we are not doing enough, because there is the tendency to act when the problem is already there,” Peris said.
“I would expect that 10 years from now, we will look back and understand that noise was indeed toxic,” said Hempton. “And the future generations will have problems understanding what took us so long to be responsive.”