At 8:30 PM on Saturday 26th March 2011, lights will switch off for one hour around the globe for Earth Hour and people will commit to actions that go beyond the hour.
Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million individuals and more than 2,000 businesses turned their lights off for one hour to take a stand against climate change.
Only one year later Earth Hour had become a global sustainability movement with more than 50 million people across 35 countries/territories participating. Global landmarks such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, CN Tower in Toronto, Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and Rome’s Colosseum, went dark to support the cause.
Despite the international acceptance and support, Earth Hour has been plagued by accusations of poor effectiveness. ‘What happens at 9:31 when all the lights go back on?’ and ‘What kind of change can a one-off event really have?’ were justified questions.
Social media and the internet came to the rescue. As an answer to this criticism a new platform called “Beyond the Hour” has been designed – for and powered by its millions of supporters. With this new platform people are invited to go beyond the hour and take action all year long.
New platform “Beyond the Hour”
“Beyond the Hour” is a platform that allows anybody to post and pledge their environmental actions all year long. People can share their promises and stories through social networks and get inspiration from the actions others are doing. The key note is that together single actions add up into big movements. And with the global scale in mind, the platform will be translated into 11 different languages.
Users can mouse over the dynamic images to preview randomly selected actions or search by a variety of terms, including location. If users see an action that speaks to them, they can join in by clicking “do this” to mirror the pledge.
An app version of the platform has already landed in the iTunes store for iPhone, with an Android version on the way. Both offer all the same functionality of the web app.
Earth Hour also created embeddable widgets to allow bloggers to share “Beyond the Hour” from their own sites. All of these projects feed back into the platform.