Earth Hour is a global grassroots movement uniting people to take action on environmental issues and protect the planet. Engaging a massive mainstream community, Earth Hour was famously started as a lights out event in Sydney, Australia in 2007.

In 2022, people from 192 countries and territories came together in support of people and our planet. We saw landmarks turn off their lights and supporters switch off at home, as well as a range of activities such as virtual concerts, mangrove planting, street clean-ups and virtual runs.

WWF Namibia and our field partners take the ethos of Earth Hour to rural communities, where actions and impact are critical to conservation efforts. In 2022, we used the Earth Hour theme, #shapeourfuture, to start the conservation about the future with out of school / unemployed youth in conservancies and inspire them to take an active part in conservation matters within their respective conservancies and regions.

These youth will take a lead in piloting the Wild Landscapes Biodiversity App within conservancies. The App is designed to gather biodiversity information that has not been collected at a local level. This will require youth to walk around in their conservancy and record the species of plants, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, etc that they come across. The data will provide a biodiversity baseline in their respective conservancy which will address knowledge gaps and, at a later stage, be feed into the national Atlas App.