When Alexander Radi opens the French window of his living room, his gaze falls on the foliage of a nearby shrubbery. After a downpour of rain, a break in the clouds gives appeal to the garden where two hens cackle; but they are soon drowned out by the roar of a twin-engine jet descending on Nantes-Atlantique airport in the south-west of the city.
Radi, a 43-year-old engineer, lives in Rezé, a town of 40,000 inhabitants near the airport, with his partner and two children. He works a lot from home and suffers from aircraft noise dozens of times a day. He blames this for lack of sleep, "impact on mood" and difficulty concentrating.
In Rezé, as elsewhere, noise pollution represents a major health and economic challenge. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 1 million years of healthy life are lost every year in Western Europe due to transport noise. In 2021, a report by l’Agence de la Transition Écologique (Agency for Environmental Transition, ADEME) estimated the "social cost" of noise in France at €147 billion a year.
Radi lives a little outside the perimeter where residents of the Nantes-Atlantique airport can, under certain conditions, claim financial aid to soundproof their homes. But he's not totally powerless, thanks to SonoRezé, an initiative launched in 2021 by the town council and researchers, aiming to gain a better understanding of noise in the city to inform public policy. It's something in which Radi is actively involved.
Volunteer residents first install the NoiseCapture application on their smartphones, enabling them to record the sounds around them, identify their source and assign them a degree of annoyance. Each episode is geolocated, enabling acoustic maps to be drawn up. Residents then focused on aircraft noise.
"Today, people with lesser exposure are not taken into account, yet annoyance starts at a low level," according to Arnaud Can, SonoRezé craftsman and research director at the Joint Research Unit in Environmental Acoustics (Gustave-Eiffel University and the Centre d'Études et d'Expertise sur les Risques, l'Environnement, la Mobilité et l'Aménagement). In fact, regulatory maps organizing noise management near French airports only consider areas where the reference indicator exceeds 55 decibels. Yet the WHO recommended in 2018 that the public should not be exposed to air traffic noise exceeding 45 decibels.
Researchers have modeled the effects of aircraft noise using this more restrictive "annoyance threshold." Logically, their calculations result in a higher number of affected residents than official methods. This helps politicians to assert the interests of their constituents, for example by requesting an extension of the airport curfew.
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