Dubai: This Earth Hour, go beyond switching off your lights for 60 minutes to save energy. Turn off your taps, whenever possible, as well.

Dubai is marking Earth Hour 2015 for the eighth consecutive year on March 28 along with 7,000 cities in 162 countries around the world.

Earth Hour is a global movement held annually that started in 2007. It called on cities and homes to switch off their lights for one hour to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are the main cause of global warming and climate change.

Dubai first celebrated the event in 2008.

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) is spearheading the event along with Emirates Wildlife Society (EWS-WWF) and other partners.

Saeed Al Tayer, Managing Director and CEO of Dewa, said there are no specific energy-saving targets this year but he hopes Dubai can collectively save up to 300,000kWh during Earth Hour. Last year’s savings was 255,000kWh.

Ida Tillisch, Director-General of EWS-WWF, said Dubai’s focus this year is relevant and unique to the region — water conservation. Since freshwater sources in the UAE are scarce, the country makes up for it by desalinating seawater, which requires about 10 times more energy than surface fresh water production.

“This is a very water-scarce region and using salt water desalination is really energy-intensive. So, there’s definitely a need for understanding better water use. We, here in the UAE, should be using a lot less water because we have less water,” Tillisch told Gulf News.

But this is not the case. The UAE ranks third among the world’s highest water consumers per person according to the UN Environment Programme in 2013. This means, an average UAE resident consumes about 550 litres of water a day, more than three times the world’s average per person.

“It’s really critical that we start thinking about our water consumption,” Tillisch added.

Small acts of conserving energy during Earth Hour and going beyond it by using water-saving devices, switching to energy-efficient lighting, and switching off non-essential lighting when not in use, can achieve a lot when done collectively.

For the past seven years of Earth Hour in Dubai, for example, the emirate has collectively saved 1,291MWh — enough energy to power 81 average homes for one year, based on the Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator of the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA). This is equivalent to saving one year's worth of greenhouse gas emissions of 187 passenger vehicles from being released into the atmosphere.

Al Tayer said through its other 124 initiatives, Dewa has so far saved a total of 1,163GWh of electricity and 5.4 billion imperial gallons of water equivalent to Dh752 million and over 536,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.