Since 2012, our nights have been getting brighter, according to a new study published in Science Advances. Researchers led by Christopher Keeba of the German Geosciences GFZ used satellite imagery to track changes in nighttime outdoor lighting around the world, and found that the area of the Earth's illuminated area grew by 2.2 percent per year between 2012 and 2016. … In addition, the brightness of constantly lit areas also increases by 2.2 percent per year. Thus, humanity is losing more and more dark nights on a planetary scale.
Some areas of the planet have remained largely the same, as many of these regions, including Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States, were already the brightest from the very beginning. Lighting has increased throughout South America, Africa and Asia. And it is likely that the figures obtained will underestimate the scale of the problem, because the satellite used by the researchers does not detect the blue light emitted by LEDs, which have been increasingly used for lighting over the past few years.
“The numbers are truly shocking because we know that night lighting can have widespread effects on both the environment and human health,” said University of Exeter researcher Thomas Davis, who was not involved in the study. "It is not clear exactly how much this will affect human health and the environment, since night lighting is a fairly new phenomenon." “Artificial light at night is a very specific new kind of stress,” echoes Franz Holker, one of the project's researchers. "The problem is that light was introduced at places, times and intensities where it doesn't naturally occur, and for many organisms there is simply no way to adapt to this new stress factor."
And if we don't change the way we light our outdoor spaces, this trend is likely to continue. "In the short term, it looks like artificial light emitted into the environment will continue to grow, further exposing the remaining area of the Earth, which typically experiences natural daylight cycles," the study said.
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