Asian metropolises have kicked off the “Earth Hour”, an annual operation to mobilize against climate change and for the conservation of nature, in which cities around the world turned off their lights for a period of time. hour Saturday March 27 in the evening.
To kick off the event, the lights of skyscrapers from Singapore to Hong Kong went out at 8:30 p.m. local time. In Hong Kong, forests of towers have fallen into obscurity, as has the historic Namdaemun Gate in Seoul. In Thailand, Bangkok’s hugely popular CentralWorld mall set off a countdown, and at 8:30 p.m. its outdoor windows went out for an hour, like the Sydney Opera House in Australia.
The Colosseum, in Rome; Red Square, in Moscow; the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; the Palace of Westminster and the illuminated signs of Piccadilly Circus, London; or the three floors of the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, were successively plunged into darkness, even if curfew required, very few were able to take advantage of it.
Antoni Gaudi’s famous Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, northeastern Spain, and the Imperial Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, are also among the many sites, monuments and buildings that have extinguished their fires between 20 h:30 and 9:30 p.m., across time zones.
“It’s fantastic that Parliament is once again a stakeholder in the ‘Earth Hour’, joining other monuments in the country and around the world to increase awareness of climate change ”, said Lindsay Hoyle, speaker (chair) of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom. Following the sun, the monuments of America then extinguished their fires, from the obelisk in central Buenos Aires to the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro through the BBVA skyscraper in Mexico City.
“Nature is in free fall”
This annual mobilization (“Time of the planet”, in French), organized by WWF, is intended to call for action on climate change and the environment. This year, the organizers wanted to highlight the link between the destruction of nature and the increasing incidence of diseases like Covid-19.
“Whether it’s the decline of pollinators, dwindling numbers of fish in oceans and rivers, the disappearance of forests or the more general loss of biodiversity, the evidence is mounting that nature is in free fall “, said Marco Lambertini, the director general of WWF, which has been organizing the Earth Hour since 2007. “Protecting nature is our moral responsibility, but losing it also increases our vulnerability to pandemics, accelerates climate change and threatens our food security”, he added.