Earth Hour

Earth Hour is an annual global campaign that encourages people and businesses around the world to switch off electricity at the same time for one hour. The aim is to get people thinking about the planet they live on and the energy they use.

Earth Hour is organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). It was started by Andy Ridley, originally from Britain, who is executive director of Earth Hour Global, WWF. He came up with the idea of Earth Hour because he wanted to raise awareness of environmental issues by asking people to do something positive to help the planet. Switching off the lights for an hour can make a small difference to the amount of energy we use but Earth Hour is also a symbolic event to make people think about the problems of climate change.

Earth Hour started in Australia in 2007 when 2.2 million people in the city of Sydney turned off all non-essential lights for an hour. Since then it has grown to a massive global event. In 2013, millions of people in 7,000 cities and towns around the world switched off their lights for 60 minutes at the end of March, when is around the time of the spring and autumn equinoxes in the northern and southern hemispheres respectively, so sunset times in both hemispheres are at similar times. This means that a global ‘lights out’ event has most visual impact at this time of year.

Every year landmarks and well-known buildings around the world such as the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, the Petronas towers in Malaysia, the UK Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye, Buckingham Palace, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower among others, take part and ‘go dark’ for Earth Hour. The campaign even went into space when astronauts reduced power on the International Space Station in 2011.

Earth Hour 2014 will have Spider-Man as the first superhero ambassador and also launches Earth Hour Blue, a digital crowdfunding and crowdsourcing platform for the planet.
Earth Hour 2014 will be held on Saturday 29th March between 8.30 p.m. and 9.30 p.m. in your local time zone. A lot of world events take part every year. Will you take part? 
Watch Spider-Man video at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZhbIyrx4AQ
See more at: http://www.earthhour.org/

Source: Wikipedia - Earthhour