LED Lighting Could Be Increasing Global Light Pollution, New Research Suggests
Advances in lighting, especially with the advent of affordable LED lights, seem to have accelerated a worrying trend. A new research found that the Earth's nighttime outdoors has been growing brighter by 2 percent every year, with its attendant effects on animal life and people.
Nighttime on the planet has been brighter than ever, and the new, energy-efficient LED lights may have driven people to install brighter bulbs in ever increasing numbers, as Christopher Kyba from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geoscience and his team noted in their study published in Science Advances.
The "lighting revolution" brought in by solid-state lighting technology, the most popular of which is represented by LED bulbs, may have brought in huge energy savings for everyone. The fact may have indirectly led to people installing more and brighter bulbs outdoors, as the study pointed out.
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"We use the first-ever calibrated satellite radiometer designed for night lights to show that from 2012 to 2016, Earth's artificially lit outdoor area grew by 2.2% per year, with a total radiance growth of 1.8% per year," the researchers found.
Night skies over developing countries are growing brighter even faster than in developed countries as well, according to Reuters. This trend could have an adverse effect on nocturnal animals, marine life, and people themselves.
Ecologist Franz Hölker of Germany's Leibniz-Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries described how the growing night flow can affect plants, animals, and human sleep patterns.
"It threatens biodiversity through changed night habits, such as reproduction or migration patterns, of many different species: insects, amphibians, fish, birds, bats and other animals," Hölker noted.
Some areas have exhibited the reverse. Night lights in war-torn Syria and Yemen, for example, have actually declined over the course of the study which examined satellite data from 2012 to 2016.
