Aviation noise impact management through novel approaches
Aircraft noise continues to cause adverse effects on quality of life and public health in airports’ neighbourhood. To address this challenge and ensure airports will have the capability to respond to the growing traffic demand, ANIMA aims to develop new methodologies and tools to manage and mitigate the impact of aviation noise, improving the quality of life near airports while facilitating airports growth and competitiveness of the EU aviation sector within the environmental limits, also considering 24/7 operations. Hence, ANIMA carries out critical review and assessment of noise impacts and existing management practices to establish best practices’ guidelines for an effective management of annoyance beyond ICAO Balanced Approach (WP2); develops a better understanding to address community annoyance, sleep disturbance and improve quality of life through pilot studies and surveys, assessing new methodologies reducing annoyance, testing novel and cost-effective solutions for land-use planning, using also mobile applications, the whole to derive new indicators (WP3); develops a 24/7 Noise Management Toolset to empower non-specialists with decision support capability and a 24/7 Design Toolset for researchers (WP4); tests and validates with end-users (airports and community) an “Aviation noise community platform”, gathering tools and best practices, facilitating consensus building and engaging communities in the mitigation process, ensuring exploitation of the results (WP5); supports the coordination of national and EU research activities, establishing a common strategic research roadmap for aviation noise reduction through the involvement of a pan-European network of experts and project leaders, also addressing international collaboration opportunities (WP6). ANIMA, a 4-year cost-effective project (total budget 7 479 618 €) builds on its consortium’s multidisciplinary excellence gathering 21 partners (Industry, SMEs, RTOs, Universities, airports and local authorities) from 11 countries.