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Monitoring, trends and impacts of light pollution

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From Nature Reviews Earth & Environment

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Abstract

Light pollution has increased globally, with 80% of the total population now living under light-polluted skies. In this Review, we elucidate the scope and importance of light pollution and discuss techniques to monitor it. In urban areas, light emissions from sources such as street lights lead to a zenith radiance 40 times larger than that of an unpolluted night sky. Non-urban areas account for over 50% of the total night-time light observed by satellites, with contributions from sources such as transportation networks and resource extraction. Artificial light can disturb the migratory and reproductive behaviours of animals even at the low illuminances from diffuse skyglow. Additionally, lighting (indoor and outdoor) accounts for 20% of global electricity consumption and 6% of CO2 emissions, leading to indirect environmental impacts and a financial cost. However, existing monitoring techniques can only perform a limited number of measurements throughout the night and lack spectral and spatial resolution. Therefore, satellites with improved spectral and spatial resolution are needed to enable time series analysis of light pollution trends throughout the night.

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Fig. 1: Sources of light at night.
Fig. 2: Approaches to measure light at night.
Fig. 3: Global and local radiance trends.
Fig. 4: The direct and indirect effects of light pollution.
Fig. 5: Light emissions as a proxy for human activity.

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Data availability

The Radiance Light Trends webtool used to obtain the data plotted in Fig. 5 is available at https://doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.1.4.2019.001.

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Acknowledgements

A.A., A.S, C.C.M.K., F.H., H.L.A., M.A., M.K. and T.D. received funding for this work through ESA’s New Earth Observation Mission Ideas (NEOMI) program under contract 4000139244/22/NL. A.S.d.M. has been funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement number 847635 (UNA4CAREER). A.J. was supported by the project BELLVUE “Beleuchtungsplanung: Verfahren und Methoden für eine naturschutzfreundliche Beleuchtungsgestaltung” by the BfN with funds from the BMU (FKZ: 3521 84 1000).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stars4All Foundation, Madrid, Spain

    Hector Linares Arroyo

  2. Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Twente, Netherlands

    Angela Abascal & Monika Kuffer

  3. Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Berlin, Germany

    Tobias Degen, Franz Hölker & Andreas Jechow

  4. Department of Zoology II, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Tobias Degen

  5. Département de Physique, Cégep de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada

    Martin Aubé & Alexandre Simoneau

  6. Département de Géomatique Appliquée, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada

    Martin Aubé & Alexandre Simoneau

  7. School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Brian R. Espey

  8. Adler Planetarium, Chicago, IL, USA

    Geza Gyuk & Ken Walczak

  9. Institute of Biology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Franz Hölker

  10. Department of Engineering, Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences, Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany

    Andreas Jechow

  11. Física de la Tierra y Astrofísica. Instituto de Física de Partículas y del Cosmos (IPARCOS), Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain

    Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel

  12. Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK

    Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel

  13. GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany

    Christopher C. M. Kyba

  14. Geographisches Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Christopher C. M. Kyba

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  1. Hector Linares Arroyo
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Contributions

H.L.A, A.A., T.D., F.H., A.J., M.K., A.S.d.M., K.W. and C.C.M.K. researched data for the article. H.L.A., A.A., M.A., T.D., B.R.E., G.G., F.H., M.K., A.S., K.W. and C.C.M.K contributed substantially to the discussion of the content. H.L.A., A.A., T.D., F.H., A.J., M.K., A.S.d.M., K.W. and C.C.M.K. wrote the article. H.L.A., A.A., A.S. and C.C.M.K. reviewed and/or edited the manuscript before submission.

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Correspondence to Hector Linares Arroyo.

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Nature Reviews Earth & Environment thanks Qingling Zhang, Avalon Owens and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Linares Arroyo, H., Abascal, A., Degen, T. et al. Monitoring, trends and impacts of light pollution. Nat Rev Earth Environ 5, 417–430 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00555-9

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