Eiffel tower switches off lights for Earth Hour

The Eiffel Tower in Paris will stop twinkling this evening as part of Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to raise awareness about global warming.

DR

The world famous landmark in the City of Light will be one of nearly 400 monuments across France participating in the event - which kicks off at 8:30pm local time tonight.

For security reasons, the lights will be turned off for just five minutes, but other monuments like the Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe will be plunged into darkness for the full hour.

More than 100 towns across France are running similar operations.

Strasbourg in the country’s east says it expects to save 672 kilowatts of electricity during the hour.

The event, organised by the World Wildlife Fund and the advertising agency Leo Burnett, first began in Australia in 2007 when millions of people turned off non-essential lights.

But Isabelle Autissier, the president of the World Wildlife Fund in France, told RFI it is not just about saving a few kilowatts of energy.

“The message is not because you switch off your lights for an hour that it will change something, but the thing is that…the major preoccupation of people all over the planet is climate change. It’s very important to show that the people are ready to change. And they want to say that to the politicians. You can change individually, you can change your way of life, but you can also change at the global level, at the state level,” she says.

More than 12 million people in France took part in the event last year.

Across the world, monuments including the Kremlin in Moscow and the Empire State Building in New York will also take part.