News: Brighton and Hove City Council leader Jason Kitcat on Earth Hour

It’s time again to lose an hour so we can recalibrate our clocks and our brains to summertime. At a stroke, we’ll conjure up lighter evenings, hastening our arrival into spring.

On Saturday 28 March at 8.30pm, WWF’s Earth Hour will call on us to switch off our lights and turn the spotlight onto climate change. The event is reportedly the world’s largest grassroots movement for the environment, inspiring and uniting millions around the world to use their power for change. In the darkness of Earth Hour we can reflect on the environmental burden of our lifestyles while marveling, in its absence, at the wonders of electric light.

2015 is the UN International Year of Light. UNESCO is celebrating the importance of light to life and to culture and highlighting how optical technologies can be harnessed to promote sustainable development and offer solutions to worldwide challenges of energy, communications and healthcare. In Brighton & Hove our 19,000 street lamps help make our streets safe every night of the year. It’s easy to forget that a quarter of the world, 1.5 billion people, live with no artificial light at all. While powering our street lights needs four thousand tonnes of CO2 per year, swathes of Africa and south Asia share dark nights for people.

So, in this Year of Light, and at this weekend’s Earth Hour, we can at least acknowledge this imbalance and look at what we can do to remedy it. Here we’re installing thousands of low energy street lamps to slash their carbon cost. Meanwhile some of the poorest and most isolated communities are using solar power for lighting, mobile phone charging and healthcare provision without the carbon downside. For a planet so bathed in light we’ve still barely started to tap its potential.

Enjoy the lighter evenings!