Earth Hour 2015 is right around the corner and once again participating countries will be partly going off the grid for an hour to do their bit for the environment.
Turning off the lights for an hour sounds like a simple act but when done by millions of individuals and businesses around the world, the reduction in electricity use can have a dramatic impact.
This year, Earth Hour will be held from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 28. It will involve more than 2.2 million people and around 2,000 business from 7,000 cities across the world. Last year, 162 countries participated in the effort.
It all started as a simple lights-off event in 2007 in Sydney. Today, it is a registered charitable organization in Singapore and Earth Hour is a global environmental movement organized by the World Wildlife Fund. While the movement primarily targets reducing carbon emissions by lessening electrical load, the effort has led to many other successes relating to the environment.
Earth Hour Australia, for one, ran a campaign to protect the Great Barrier Reef from climate change and gas and coal ports while the Blue Sky project for Earth Hour 2014 provided crowdsourcing solutions on social media for air pollution and smog issues in China. Those who participated in the collaboration between Earth Hour and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 also helped protect pandas in China by raising $42,439.
Turning off the lights just for one hour resulted in a drop of 205 megawatts in electricity in 2013 in Toronto, Canada, which is equivalent to taking around 92,000 homes off the grid and is a 7 percent decrease from the regular demand. For the same year, Bangkok reported saving 1.7 gigawatts of electricity, translating to approximately 1,073 tons of carbon dioxide not emitted into the atmosphere. (A megawatt is 1 million watts. A watt is the basic yardstick to measure power, the rate at which it is consumed or generated - so a 100-watt lightbulb would consume 100 watts of power when it is turned on, and if you leave it burning for a year, Climate Central says it would need 700 pounds of coal to power it.)
If Earth Hour occurred more frequently, imagine how much stress would be taken away from the environment.
The WWF said that 9 million people participated in Earth Hour 2014 and about 85 percent of them said that they were inspired to do more to help protect the environment as they have seen that just turning off the lights for one hour could have an impact.
"Evidence shows that extensive behavior change requires a first step. People like to be consistent in their behavior and self-image, so by taking that first step in participating in Earth Hour, they show a commitment to energy saving that they may then carry out in other areas of their lives," said Sarah Olexsak, author of a study exploring Earth Hour's impact on the environment.
Photo: Christian Haugen | Flickr
