Mumbai: Earth Hour, in its sixth year, is the world’s biggest environment campaign to raise awareness about climate change and will be celebrated on March 29 when all one has to do is join the event is switch off the lights for an hour.
To attract public participation, particularly among the young, in this global initiative of the World Wide Fund (WWF), a celebrity is chosen in India and this year Bollywood actor Arjun Kapoor has been campaigning for Earth Hour nationally as its ambassador.
In the past, big names such as Sachin Tendulkar, Abhishek Bachchan, Amir Khan, Vidya Balan and Ajay Devgan have supported the campaign. This year, along with Kapoor, several regional stars including Mir (Kolkata), Anirudh (Chennai), Tilak (Bengaluru) and Ram Charan (Hyderabad) will be making the concept popular in different regions.
Emphasising his support for Earth Hour, Kapoor, told the media in Mumbai, “I am honoured to be part of such a pertinent cause as Earth Hour — a campaign against climate change that has the support of millions of people globally. My association with Earth Hour will bring me in close contact with one of the country’s foremost conservation organisations that has been diligently fighting against the adverse impact of climate change.”
The young actor also confessed that as children he and his sister Anshula were fond of planting trees and plants — something that their late mother Mona had taught them. At an event where Kapoor, along with Ritika Bhalla and Rituparna Sengupta of WWF and Elsie Gabriel, founder of Young Environmentalist Trust, kickstarted the Earth Hour campaign, Kapoor reflected on how “greenery is vanishing quickly, and that’s something I have been intrigued since childhood. I would like to have a garden but in Mumbai that’s impossible. So we have a garden on the terrace.”
While people are being asked to switch off their lights between 8.30-9.30pm on Saturday, Sengupta added that WWF is also kickstarting a campaign in CBSE schools to promote renewable energy and will be approaching 15,000 schools.
WWF will also be encouraging a crowd funding project to install solar lighting along the forest edge to stop tigers from entering villages in the Sundarbans, West Bengal. WWF-India has been setting up solar lights in villages here, which scare away tigers and discourages them from straying into these areas, reducing human-tiger conflicts.
Meanwhile, Gabriel appealed to Mumbaikars to “switch off all lights just for one hour to help conserve energy and spread the sustainability message. Adopt renewable energy and save the planet for our children and their children.”
Her NGO has organised a classical dance extravaganza for the occasion.