Sky glow, glare, light trespass and light clutter the combination of all of those are really the culprits, right, the ones that are creating the light pollution. Sky glow looks a little bit like this it's a haze that just lingers above your city and, like I said, it can be visible up to 200 kilometers away. It seems to be increasing at a higher rate than we previously thought. Let's talk about glare. Brighter is not better. It's not really about the quantity of light. It's mostly about the quality of light. If we have good quality lighting, we can see better Light trespass it can happen anywhere. All it takes is just really bright or badly aimed light. Maybe we need to start re-evaluating the lighting standards of the municipality or the neighborhood. Maybe we need to change a few things here and there to adjust the requirements of the lighting so we can mitigate light pollution.

Welcome back to the Virtual Lighting Design Community Podcast, a global platform that empowers, inspires, educates and connects the lighting design community. This podcast is brought to you by our premium supporters Aero Hospitality Lighting, creative Lighting Asia, erco, the Signify Lighting Academy and Philix Lighting. Today, we have the privilege of hearing from Maria Dutton, a Senior Associate at HLB Lighting Design. With over 15 years of experience. Maria is an award-winning architectural lighting designer who has made a significant impact in the industry. She has worked in New York, sydney and Dubai, bringing a wealth of global experience to her role. Maria is not only a dedicated professional, but also a passionate mentor who actively engages in educational initiatives to inspire and support aspiring lighting designers. Today, maria will share her expertise on the crucial topic of light pollution versus light poverty. Her talk will delve into the challenges and solutions associated with balancing illumination in our environment. As a thought leader in the field, maria's insights will provide valuable perspectives on addressing these critical issues. Without further ado, let's dive into this enlightening conversation with Maria Dutton.

Well, thank you so much to the VLDC for inviting me to this space and present this very interesting topic. At least it is interesting to me Light pollution versus light poverty and their effects on social development. And before we get started, I want to share an anecdote, something that happened to me when I was about 10 years old. That was the first time I remember I ever saw a pristine dark sky with all of its magnificent stars, and it happened when I was on vacation in an island and suddenly the power went off, and it turns out that it went off around 4 pm in the afternoon. It came back around 9 pm in the evening, and so, of course, my brother and I were sitting outside watching the sunset and all of these beautiful stars starting appearing, and I remember thinking to myself oh my God, I've never seen so many stars in my life. But at the same time, something interesting happened. When I looked around, everything was pitch dark and I felt like I couldn't move because I would get lost, or I wouldn't even be able to move around because there was no lighting. So, although I was experiencing something in my life that was beautiful and magnificent, at the same time I was experiencing something that was very scary and that experience stayed in my mind and I guess it never really clicked for me until very recently, when we started talking about light pollution, how we should mitigate light pollution, and also how we started talking about potentially, you know, considering darkness as an option, and that's where, to me, it clicked.

So, as we move forward in this presentation, I would like you also to think about something that is written in the Declaration of Human Rights, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's Article 25, and it says that everyone has the right to a standard of living, and I would like you all to keep that in mind as we move on in this presentation. So the agenda is very simple we're going to define what light pollution is and we're going to talk about its effects. We then will move on to defining what light poverty is and also talk about the effects of light poverty in our world, and finally, we're going to talk about the role of lighting in achieving a standard of living. So let's get started.

Light pollution is the excessive or inappropriate use of outdoor artificial light, and unfortunately, light pollution is not really generated by one thing. It's a combination of many things, and we're going to talk about sky glow. Glare, light trespass and light clutter, and the combination of all of those, are really the culprits, right the ones that are creating the light pollution problem. Let's start first with what sky glow is. It is defined as the artificial brightening of the night sky due to human created light scattering in the atmosphere that returns back to Earth. The interesting thing about the sky glow is that sky glow can actually travel up to 200 kilometers. So even if you are in an area that takes care of its night sky and uses very good shielded lighting, you can still be affected by areas that are about 200 kilometers away from you.

And in the screen I have a good example. This is in the United States. We can see two cities here Phoenix and Flagstaff. Flagstaff is a city in the United States that has very good guidelines and regulations about protecting the night sky, but, as you can see, the city of Phoenix the glow that comes out of it actually affects Flagstaff. It travels in a way that ends up lingering above Flagstaff. So another thing to keep in mind about sky glow is that it seems to be increasing at a higher rate than we previously thought. It is increasing between 6.5 to 10.4% every year in Europe and North America, and, although it hasn't been fully measured in developing countries, it is believed that in those locations, the increase in sky glow every year may actually be higher than that. So sky glow looks a little bit like this it's a haze that just lingers above your city and, like I said, it can be visible up to 200 kilometers away. And the right side we have the city of Los Angeles. On the left side we have the city of Dubai, where I currently live, and although the tint of the sky glow is very different because it depends on the type of lighting that we have in our cities, it still looks very much the same.

Let's talk about glare now. Glare is defined as the excessive brightness that can cause visual discomfort or even disability. This image that I'm showing here on the right I think it's become very famous and some of you may have already seen it, and for those of you that haven't, I wonder if you can see the person that is standing in this picture, and if you cannot, then tell me now Can you see that person now? So it turns out that if you look at the previous image closely, you will find out that that person was standing there all the time, but we couldn't see that person because the light was so bright that it was taking all of our attention. The moment that we cover the light, we are able to focus on this person, which really comes to show that brighter is not better, is not really about the quantity of light. It's mostly about the quality of light. If we have good quality lighting, we can see better.

Now speaking about light trespass light trespass is unwanted light that intrudes onto a property or area where it is not meant to go, and it can be caused by very bright luminaires, unshielded luminaires or also poorly aimed luminaires, and it can happen anywhere. People tend to think that light trespass is only a problem of the city, but it can actually happen in very low populated areas as well. All it takes is just a really bright or badly aimed light. We can see a few examples on the screen On the left, we can see very bright luminaires next to buildings, and these luminaires come from streets or from fields within the city. Or in some cases, like in the case of the image in the middle, it could be very bright facades with poorly aimed luminaires that end up entering your space, as the example on the right. This is a picture that I took in an area that's very close to where I live, and you can see that there's a stadium there Every time there's a game. Unfortunately, the people that live in that building across the street from the stadium, they have to suffer because all of this light spills out of the stadium and just enters their space.

And finally, let's define light clutter. Light clutter can be defined as bright, confusing and excessive groupings of light sources, and even though we are defining this as light sources, it can be anything that produces brightness. We are now seeing more and more all of these self-illuminating signs that are located everywhere in cities. In the image on the left we can see Tokyo, on the right we can see New York, and this is becoming more and more common. It turns out that all of these signs LED screens are becoming a big part of the live pollution problem.

So, because I live in the Middle East, I'm focusing on what is the brightness of cities in the Middle East. But here you can see the top 10 brightest metropolitan areas compared to the global urban average. And yes, on number two we have a Middle Eastern city, riyadh, but we have cities all around the world here and some of them can be even 8.1 times brighter than the global average. When we look at the brightest cities, these are non-metropolitan areas. Right, we can see three cities in the Middle East that make the top 10, mecca, kuwait City and Medina. But there are other cities around the world, again, that are much, much higher than the global average, and we can see in number one is St Petersburg being 8.1 times brighter than the global urban average. And again, because I find myself in the Middle East, I wonder well, how does that look in a map? And this is what it is. Around the Gulf, we could see a massive amount of brightness coming out of all of those cities along the coast of the Gulf, but in the center of Saudi Arabia cities along the coast of the Gulf, but in the center of Saudi Arabia we find a lot of brightness. We can also see it in the Red Sea and also around the Mediterranean, and we can really tell the shape of the Nile with all that brightness that comes out of it. But at the same time, we can see a lot of areas in this region that are very much dark, and we're going to talk about that a little later. Before we get to that let's talk about.

What are the effects of light pollution? We're going to start talking about the effects on biodiversity, because these are the ones that we're hearing the most. Unfortunately, light pollution can disrupt many natural ways in our biodiversity. For example, it can really affect the natural behavior of bugs. It can disrupt decis seasonal changes in trees. In places where we have the four seasons, for example, the trees may not shed the leaves at the time when they need to, and then they may suffer from freezing.

We all know that light pollution has very damaging effects on turtles, so it can disrupt the hatchling navigation. We all know that turtles tend to go where the light is. So if there is a very bright environment around the beaches where their eggs hatch, they can be disoriented and then they'll never make it to the sea. We have also seen disruption to migratory patterns of birds. Of course, those would be the birds that migrate at night and they can get lost and disoriented and end up in the wrong place. There has been observations of disruption to predatory patterns for mammals that hunt at night, and also disruption to roosting and feeding of bats. So what happens is that when the environment around their areas it becomes very bright, they believe it's still daytime outside, so they don't go out to hunt, and it can create a massive problem for them.

And, of course, the effects of light pollution on our health. They're becoming more and more popular to talk about, or it's becoming more and more popular to talk about the damage to our circadian rhythm that we all know gets affected not only by bright lights, but also by specific parts of the spectrum of lighting, right, and the problem is that when we start messing with our circadian rhythm, our body gets completely disrupted and it can cause problems like cancer, obesity, depression, sleep disorders, reproductive health, heart disease, diabetes and many more health, heart disease, diabetes and many more. And what's important to mention here is that obviously, we're becoming an unhealthier society, and unhealthy societies cannot help in the development of our world. Right, and also unhealthy societies become a burden to our economy and to our system. So we need to really fight for an environment that promotes health, not only for ourselves, but also for our neighborhood, for our communities, for our society in total.

Now that we have gone through light pollution, let's talk about the other extreme. Let's talk about light poverty. Now, light poverty is defined as an imbalance of the availability of electric lighting, and it can go all the way from having very little light or very poor light to having none at all. Now the latest data that we have says that approximately 1.1 billion people around the world have no access to electric lighting. So think about that number for a moment. We are 8 million people in the world. 1.1 billion people represent one in eight. One in eight people around the world live in light poverty.

Now, access to electric lighting can be constrained because of many reasons. One can be that people live in geographical areas where it's very difficult to bring the electric grid in, or maybe governments are underfunded to expand their electrical grid. Maybe there are areas where off-grid options don't exist, such as solar power lighting, for example, or there can be social and economic conflicts in that region that have either damaged the electrical grid or have avoided the possibility of bringing the electrical grid into that area. And when we look at a map, we can clearly see that light poverty, unfortunately, is more prevalent in poor countries, and that makes sense. After discussing the reasons why people may not have access to electric lighting, we can see that the African continent is really one of the worst. Outside of that area, we can find a couple of countries that are suffering quite a lot from light poverty, such as Haiti in the Americas and North Korea in Asia. And also this map doesn't take into account that in certain regions, even though the electrical grid is existent, the degrading conditions of the grid is actually causing a situation of light poverty that may not be constant, but it may be happening on a regular basis.

There are a number of organizations around the world that are fighting light poverty. The Sea Water Lamp Project is one that's very interesting. It's an organization that is addressing light poverty at the Wayuu people, which are located in the border between Colombia and Venezuela and South America, and this is what we would call an approach to address the light poverty on a personal level. So this is a little device that people can carry with them. It produces light by ionizing seawater, and it doesn't just produce light, it can also produce electricity to charge small electronic devices, as we can see in the image on the left. Now there are other organizations, like the Lightreach Network, which I've been working with. They have a program called Light for Lebanon. They have been addressing a situation of light poverty in Beirut on a more communal or neighborhood level, so their approach is to bring in solar power lighting to communities that have been affected by the degrading grid or by the problems that were caused by the explosion a couple of years ago, and by doing this they are trying to enliven spaces and bring the community a little bit of engagement right and allowing them to have spaces where they can come back, that they can come back to in the evening and again feel more alive and feel like they have a community again.

As I mentioned when we started defining light poverty, some people think that light poverty is just a lack of lighting altogether, but I like to call these situations where light is brought into neighborhood for safety reasons or because there is a lack of proper infrastructure. I would like to call that poverty as well. Some people call it inequality, but I personally don't like that, because when we search for equality, if we're not careful, we may all actually end up being equally bad. When we talk about poverty, it immediately clicks it's something that is bad and we need to fix it. In these examples, as you can see, lighting is brought in without thinking about its consequences. So, on top of creating a situation of not necessarily safety and uncomfortable environments, it can also create pollution environments. It can also create pollution, and the problem with this is that, unfortunately, the quality of lighting that we get in our environment also depends on our social status, and poor areas end up getting bad quality lighting that, at the end, can create really difficult situations for them. It can create sleep disorders, it can still create depression, it can create stress because it's not an appropriate lighting condition for people to move around, feeling safe and wanted to be outside right. So it creates this situation where the environment is not adequate to promote a safe community and a safe neighborhood.

So let's go back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a moment, and this time let's read the article in full. The article reads everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care, and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. And, as you can see, lighting is not mentioned here at all. There is no mention of lighting being part of a standard of living. But after we have seen everything that I've shown you, I'm pretty sure that we can all agree that lighting would play a role in achieving a standard of living. So let's talk about that for a moment.

Let's talk about how does lighting play a role in achieving a standard of living? And the main thing is that lighting can be an element in the community that can create a situation of safety or a sensation of safety. It can enliven communities and it can also be the promoter of health, as we have seen in the previous slides. So, absolutely, we need to start thinking about lighting as an element that can help us ensuring a standard of living. However, in order to do that, we need to make sure that we fight two evils at the same time, which is, we need to make sure that we fight two evils at the same time, which is, we need to make sure that the lighting that we bring into our communities will be such that will reduce light pollution or will avoid light pollution, and, on the other hand, we need to make sure that we are promoting access to adequate lighting at all levels of our society, because achieving a standard of living is not just for certain people, it should be for all of us.

Now, how can we do that? Where do we start? Well, when we are promoting lighting in our communities, we first of all need to understand where we are. Where is our community in terms of lighting quality? Are we a very polluted environment or are we a very pristine and clean environment? And the way to measure that is with the scale that you see on the screen, which is called the portal scale. The zero means that our city or our environment is very much polluted and we cannot see any stars at all. The seven is the representation of an excellent dark side where we can see all of the stars. So first of all, we need to define where are we? What do we need to do? Do we need to mitigate or do we need to preserve?

And once that is defined, then we need to move on to regulation. We need to make sure that all our cities, all our neighborhoods, all our communities have guidelines and regulations that will mandate how lighting is incorporated into the environment, the pristine dark skies, if we are building in an area where we have complete and full access to the natural dark sky. Or we need to make sure that the regulation will enforce behavioral changes to mitigate light pollution and diminish it. And we can do this by incorporating into our regulation, the necessity to meet sustainability certifications or the use of mandatory controls. You know, in some cases curfews could be useful. It doesn't mean that we cannot illuminate the facades of our buildings, but it means that maybe after hours is not necessary because nobody is seeing them. In existing cities where we already have regulations, maybe we need to start re-evaluating the lighting standards of the municipality or the neighborhood. Maybe we need to change a few things here and there to adjust the requirements of the lighting so we can mitigate the light pollution. And finally, following the Dark Sky Model lighting ordinance or the new recommendations from Dark Sky International is also a very good way in which we can ensure that our guidelines and our regulation for lighting will meet the proper requirements to maintain a healthy nighttime environment.

And to bring this presentation to an end, I want to show you two examples again in the United States, where you will see that it is possible to mitigate light pollution and also to preserve the quality of our night sky. When the city decided to change their street lighting to LED, they looked at three different elements that would really help them improve their situation. First of all, they looked at changing the color temperature to 3000K and they also set the street lighting to 90% until midnight and 60% intensity until sunrise. So the outcome of this measure was that, on top of the fact that they were able to save over $2 million in energy, they also noticed that the life of the luminaires was extended. The total lumens of the system were reduced by 63%, the blue spectrum was reduced by 34%, and we didn't talk about the blue spectrum in this presentation, but many of you probably know that blue spectrum lighting can be very damaging to our circadian rhythm. So it's very good that Tucson was able to reduce the blue spectrum of the street lighting. And finally, overall, they noticed a reduction in total light emissions from the city by 7%. So they actually were able to reduce light pollution by going with LEDs.

Now, the example of Flagstaff is an interesting one because Flagstaff, as I mentioned before, has very strict dark sky guidelines. They are the first dark sky lighting ordinance in the world, which was adopted in 1958. They were the first one to introduce it in the world and when they decided to go into LEDs, they took this program very seriously. In fact, they created their own program called Street Lighting for Enhancing Dark Skies, also known as SLED. It started in 2012, and it took many years before they actually made the switch to LED. They evaluated two LED technologies. The ones that are mentioned here are NBA narrow beam amber and PCA phosphor converted amber, and the keyword here is amber. They really wanted to go with a very warm color temperature to make sure that the street lighting would not damage the environment around them and, after a lot of consideration, once they made the switch, what they found out is that they had no increase in CD sky glow.

I've heard many times that clients are afraid to go into LEDs because LEDs are brighter and they have more blue, but the fact of the matter is that LEDs are very flexible and so, as long as we are able to regulate what we need and what we want from LEDs, we will be able to both reduce light emissions or maintain our pristine night sky. So, in conclusion, the more we are seeing light pollution increase, people are getting more and more concerned. Right and there has been this discussion or this discussion has started very recently that maybe we should think about going back to darkness, but in reality, darkness is not good for our social development, and nor is light pollution. However, it is very easy to promote darkness when we have the privilege to turn our lights off, so we need to come to an agreement that it is all about balance. We have seen that it is possible to introduce lighting into our environment without necessarily creating damaging outcomes, both in our environment and ourselves, and we need to admit that it is because of electric lighting that we have been able to come this far in our development as a society.

So we cannot just blame lighting for everything that's happening.

We just need to understand that lighting is just a tool and we need to use it right. It is about quality and not quantity. In the Middle East, we really have a unique opportunity because we are creating cities from the ground up. We really have the opportunity here to ensure that all the development aligns with dark sky goals while still providing high-quality lighting for proper social development. But in existing cities it's also possible, and we need to make sure that we promote regulation that will either fight light pollution before it happens or that it will help us mitigate light pollution, but at the same time, it has to be a regulation and a guideline excuse me that will promote the use of proper and adequate lighting at all levels of society, because this is the only way that we will be able to aspire to achieving a standard of living for everyone. So thank you everybody, and thank you again for the virtual lighting design community for inviting me to this space and, of course, if you have any questions, just send them my way.

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