No one could have predicted how quickly our lives can change as a result of a worldwide pandemic.
In this series of posts, we will take the opportunity to reflect on lessons from this pandemic experience. We will identify some upcoming challenges and tasks that we recommend be considered whilst working towards the effective management of aviation noise as the industry recovers following the pandemic.
Please note that throughout this series of posts, we are in no means implying that risks to health, quality of life or wellbeing from environmental noise is anything like that in scale of a global pandemic, but we are just pausing for thought and contemplating how the lessons we are learning about societal impacts during this time could help teach us something about what we were working on pre-pandemic and give a little perspective to that work.
Part 1: Introduction and lessons from the pandemic
Disasters don’t have to be all negative. The positives or often hidden optimism in us hopefully can focus our thoughts to develop learning opportunities. Many are asking how can we come back better or recover well? The pandemic has demonstrated lessons learnt about working together for common good, focussed attention on finding effective solutions, working out who and what is important to a functioning society, shown that anyone maybe vulnerable, and that we are better off working together than against each other. As the aviation industry starts its road to recovery, what can we see as the challenges ahead for evolving effective aviation noise management and its research as we move forward?
Part 2: Enhancing and moving forward the conversation
We touch on the general lessons learnt from the pandemic experience for effective communications, which included a few items focussed about the need for allowing feedback and continued conversation including:
• clear evidence of opportunities to exchange and question the information (for robustness and validity)
• open, honest dialogue, with admission of mistakes and what has been learnt from them
• willingness of those in power to be challenged and face critics – no ivory towers
• a need for constructive engagement in moving forward
• evidence of openness to listen to new ideas, with a demonstrated willingness to try things and challenge failure
It is evident that this is a vital part of the open engagement process, which is often overlooked and should be built-in to any two-way communication activity.
We have all reacted to the pandemic in different ways and with different levels of impact on our health, wellbeing and QoL. Our level of individual response to the impacts of the pandemic has been dependent on many variables such as differences in coping strategies and thresholds, personalities, sensitivities, family support, levels of housing, access to outdoor space, affluence, ethnicity, health inequalities, age, attitudes, mental health status, uncertainty of future, fear, rights for choice, need for trust in decision makers, fairness, belief system, vulnerabilities, levels of communication, and so on.
It is therefore not surprising that the same is true of our response to other stimuli, such as environmental or aviation noise. There are many factors that determine the level of response. In fact, research suggests that, at best, only a third of the annoyance response to aircraft noise relates to noise level alone.
