Candles lit in China for Operation Earth Hour, March 27, 2021. – Tang Ke / Costfoto / Sipa USA / SIPA
Like every year, the world took 60 minutes in the dark on Saturday to mobilize against climate change and for the protection of nature. Cities turned off their lights on Saturday for the “Earth Hour”, an operation organized since 2007 by the WWF.
To kick off the event, the lights of skyscrapers in Asian metropolises, from Singapore to Hong Kong, went out at 8:30 p.m., as did landmarks such as the Sydney Opera House. The Colosseum in Rome, Red Square in Moscow, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Palace of Westminster, the illuminated signs of Piccadilly Circus in London or the three floors of the Eiffel Tower in Paris have also been successively immersed in the darkness. Antoni Gaudi’s famous Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and Schönbrunn Imperial Palace in Vienna are also among the many sites, monuments and buildings that have extinguished their fires between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., across time zones.
A link with the coronavirus
Health crisis requires, this year, the organizers wanted to highlight the link between the destruction of nature and the growing incidence of diseases such as Covid-19. “Whether it’s the decline of pollinators, the 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 ”, explains Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF. According to him, “protecting nature is our moral responsibility, but losing it also increases our vulnerability to pandemics, accelerates climate change and threatens our food security”.