Earth Hour is a worldwide event organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and held towards the end of March annually, encouraging households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour to raise awareness about the need to take action on climate change.

The event, conceived by WWF and Leo Burnett, first took place in 2007, when 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights.

Following Sydney’s lead, many other cities around the world adopted the event in 2008

From BBC

Landmarks and city skylines around the world have been plunged into darkness for an hour to mark Earth Hour, the annual switch-off to raise awareness about climate change.

1. Here before and after pictures show the National Library of Belarus. REUTERS
2. In Beijing, an LED sky screen was demonstrated before the switch-off, which took place at 20:30 local time in each place. GETTY IMAGES
3. The event, now in its seventh year, produces unusual views of iconic landmarks like the Welcome monument in Jakarta. AFP
4. In many places, people lit candles as the lights went off. REUTERS
5. Organisers say the event has played a part in drawing people’s attention to energy use. GETTY IMAGES
6. In Singapore, dancers produced kinetic energy to power an outdoor film show. AP
7. Moscow’s Kremlin took part in the event for the first time, as did Tunisia, Surinam, Rwanda and the Palestinian territories. AFP
8. In Sofia, Bulgaria, Earth Hour saw a performance by fire acrobats. AFP
9. Environmental group WWF says Earth Hour has become the world’s largest demonstration of support for action on carbon emissions. APP

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For more on this story go to:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-21913931

Earth Hour is the single, largest, symbolic mass participation event in the world.   Born out of a hope that we could mobilize people to take action on climate change, Earth Hour now inspires a global community of millions of people in 7,001 cities and towns across 152 countries and territories to switch lights off for an hour as a massive show of concern for the environment.

This year it was held on Saturday March 23^rd from 8:30pm – 9:30pm wherever you were in the world. But NOT in the Cayman Islands.

For more on Earth Hour go to:

http://www.earthhour.org/