🤫Silencio abstract
For a quieter world
Lite Paper 1.0 - Official Whitepaper coming in 2024
Silencio is a community-powered network that rewards users for providing hyper-local noise pollution data.
According to the World Economic Forum, 68% of the global population will live in cities by 2050 (1). This increase in dwellings and movement will generate safety, health, access, and mobility challenges for those cities. The flow-on effect of this will be noise and the impact of that on the current but also future communities.
"Noise ranks together with air pollution as the environmental exposures most harmful to public health" (European Environmental Agency) (2).
Environmental noise has often been referred to as the ‘forgotten pollutant’ but is now recognized as an environmental and public health issue that needs to be addressed in modern society.
Noise exposure can lead to negative health effects varying from annoyance and sleep deprivation to more serious issues such as hearing impairment and cardiovascular diseases. Indeed, excessive exposure to environmental noise has been linked to a series of negative health effects in children including cognitive impairment (3).
The World Health Organization recently estimated that at least 1 million healthy life years are lost every year from traffic-related noise alone in Western Europe while the social cost of noise from road and rail across the EU has been valued at approximately +€40 billion per year (4).
The key to driving effective change in environmental noise pollution is to clearly define the problem and then identify appropriate control strategies and actions.
The European Union considers Environmental Noise as one of the headline targets of the zero pollution action plan, targeting a reduction of 30% by 2030 in comparison to 2017 (5). The European Noise directive requires EU countries to prepare and publish noise maps and management action plans. The issue with this lies in the accumulation of data. Most countries develop Noise maps based on samples of a fraction of the city scaled to the size of the entire region. This data is not necessarily an accurate depiction of the Noise Pollution in a city and can lead to inefficient mitigation strategies that target areas potentially insignificant. If only there were a better way...
Silencio is a free application that aims to become the largest citizen science project in the world in order to combat noise pollution. The app allows users to share their surrounding sound level (dBA) and earn rewards for doing so. Users can also monetize their data when it is sold. By using Silencio, users have the opportunity to create a passive income while also improving the quality of life for themselves and others.
Silencio aims to collect hyperlocal and real data from its users, which can then be commercialized for use in various industries, including real estate, the gastronomy and hotel industry, the well-being industry, the insurance industry, governments and city planners, and academic institutions. With sufficient data, Silencio hopes to make a significant impact in the fight against noise pollution and improve the quality of life of millions of people across the globe.
"The day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorable as cholera and the plague" Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Robert Koch in 1905
Sources
World Economic Forum (Ed.). (2021, January 21). Here's how rising global risks will change our cities. World Economic Forum. Retrieved 2022, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/how-we-live-and-work-will-change-so-will-the-cities-we-inhabit/
European Environmental Agency (Ed.). (2022, December 14). Noise. European Environment Agency. Retrieved 2022, from https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/human/noise
Basner, M., & McGuire, S. (2018). WHO Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region: A Systematic Review on Environmental Noise and Effects on Sleep. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(3), 519. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15030519
WHO and JRC, 2011,Burden of disease from environmental noise — quantification of healthy life years lost in Europe, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland accessed 5 May 2014
European Commission. (2016). Evaluation of Directive 2002/49/EC Relating to the Assessment and Management of Environmental Noise: Final Report. Directorate-General for Environment. Retrieved from https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2779/171432
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