Artificially lit surface of Earth at night increasing in radiance and extent
By Christopher C. M. Kyba, Theres Kuester, Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel, Kimberly E. Baugh, A. Jechow, Franz Hölker, Jonathan Bennie, Christopher D. Elvidge, Kevin J. Gaston, Luis Guanter. Science Advances, 2017
845 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Earth’s artificially lit area is expanding at 2.2% per year, with existing lit areas brightening by 2.2% per year. A central aim of the “lighting revolution” (the transition to solid-state lighting technology) is decreased energy consumption. This could be undermined by a rebound effect of increased use in response to lowered cost of light. 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. Continuously lit areas brightened at a rate of 2.2% per year. Large differences in national growth rates were observed, with lighting remaining stable or decreasing in only a few countries. These data are not consistent with global scale energy reductions but rather indicate increased light pollution, with corresponding negative consequences for flora, fauna, and human well-being.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33a3c462f6fbb1ffb2e21b9412f64b6b3a9c9daf
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing of Nighttime Light Observations: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives (2019, background): “Widespread studies have been conducted to characterize the distribution of light pollution from local [68,180–182], national [183–185], regional [186], and global scales [187,188] using various NTL datasets derived from different sensors.”
- Light Pollution, Circadian Photoreception, and Melatonin in Vertebrates (2019, background): “ALAN is increasing exponentially worldwide, in terms of lit area and brightness, at rates >2% per annum on average [17,35], with peaks at rates >40% in the developing world.”
- Is light pollution driving moth population declines? A review of causal mechanisms across the life cycle (2020, background): “Furthermore, rapid shifts are underway in the spectral composition of outdoor lighting (Kyba et al., 2017;Davies&Smyth, 2018).”
- Bright lights in the big cities: migratory birds’ exposure to artificial light (2019, methodology): “ALAN continues to increase in many areas globally (Kyba et al. 2017), presenting an ever- growing ecological threat to all nocturnally active animals (Longcore and Rich 2004; Guetté et al.”