Environmental organisation WWF is organising the tenth annual Earth Hour event around the globe, urging households, businesses and governments to symbolically turn off electric lights to bring awareness to wastage and global warming.
This year the WWF wants to target conceptions of the effects of food production on the environment. The organisation predicts that food production will form an ever larger portion of the global strain on the global climate. Measures to make methods of production environmentally friendly have not lead to broad-scale developments, unlike the automobile industry.
"New innovations in traffic control and energy production are constantly being brought to the table," Earth Hour coordinator Suvi Salminen says. "But no such leaps have come around in food production. A cow is still a cow."
Beef most harmful
A report by Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) shows that consumers believe that the biggest food production factors that contribute to the environmental burden are packaging, logistics and processing.
"People are getting more and more educated, but people still think it's better to eat domestic pork than vegetables flown in from abroad. This just isn't the case," says WWF programme manager Jussi Nikula.
Most of the negative environmental impact takes place in the early phases of production, in agriculture.
Of all individual foodstuffs, the production of beef is the runaway number one in harming the environment. A significant factor is the methane gas that escapes when cows chew their cud in the field.
"Grasslands, the cows' food, absorbs carbon and grazing is a positive thing. But this by no means compensates for the overall environmental load caused by meat production," Nikula says.
Other foodstuffs with high carbon footprints are pork, chicken and cheese. The WWF says that Finns eat more meat than is considered healthy, and that cutting down would be a big step in combating climate change.
Anyone can participate
Anyone at all can partake in Earth Hour by turning off the lights in their homes or places of work from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm tonight.
The event will be shutting down landmarks such as the Empire State Building, Sydney Opera House and the Eiffel Tower. In Helsinki the Finlandia Hall will go dark, as will the Yle broadcast tower and the Tampere Näsinneula tower.
Watch as Yle livestreams Earth Hour in Helsinki's city centre, from 8:20 pm onwards.
