Pollution, we heard about this phrase almost everyday in our life, and it is getting worse with the world development and modernization. There are many types of pollutions affecting our nature that can cause humorous damaged to the environment, the ecosystem and our health; such as land pollution, air pollution, water pollution, noise and light pollution, etc. Among the several types of pollutions mentioned above, this essay will be focusing on light pollution and the problems associated with. As well as, addressing how the Hong Kong government should educated citizens and to raise the awareness of this increasingly noticeable issue.
What is light pollution?
Light pollution is a phenomenon that associated with excessive artificial lighting source from urbanisation of development and human activities on outdoor lighting, it is also a chain reaction due to industrial civilization. In Hong Kong, light pollution occurs with such excessive uses of lights from the building itself and the interior lighting, shop signs, advertising billboards, sports field lighting, neon lights, illuminated signboards and street lights in residential area. The excessive outdoor lighting used at night is inefficient, and in many cases, is being wasted by spilling it into the sky, as opposed to be concentrated to the actual objects and zones that individuals need to be lighten up.
What are the problems associated with it?
Light pollution is damaging the environment and ecosystem, caused increasing energy consumption and raise the risk of developing dangerous health diseases. With light pollution, it will disturb our biological clock and influence our brain and hormone function, which increase the risk on having cancer, insomnia, cardiovascular disease, depression and other health issues. The interruption disturbance is related with troubles to synchronize natural procedure, including sleeping behaviour, mood function. Additionally light-at-night theory is an environmental exposure that has become integral to our lives, expresses the proposed organic component and that this concealment of melatonin may then prompt expanded the chance of getting breast cancer by prompting increased oestrogen production.
Excessive outdoor light not just affecting the circadian rhythms for humans but also nocturnal animals, in addition leads to change of behavior for the ecology animals and environment disrupt ecosystem of altering nighttime to daytime. The vivid electric lights will distort the bird’s behavior, they can be perplexed and ensnared by lights at night as they relied on lights to their migration. Consistently confused them when pass by the beaming lit buildings, communication towers, and other architectures. Huge amount of birds are consequently influenced when meteorological conditions convey them near to lights, therefore they will fly lower during inclement weather or evening. The excessive used of lights will confuse the life cycle of the nocturnal activities of amphibians, thus interfering with their breeding process. The excessive of light at night will suppress mating calls between frogs, as a consequence reducing their reproductive capacity.
Besides, light pollution can affects the visibility of sky objects. Categories of light pollution comes in different forms, including sky glow, light trespass, glare, light clutter, and over illumination. Sky glow is the bright halo that shows up over urban territories during nighttime, a result of light being dissipated by water droplets or water particles in the air; light trespass are light falling where it is not intended to be; glare is made by light that sparkles horizontal plane; light clutter are the excessive groupings of light sources and over illumination refers to the use of artificial light well beyond what is required for a particular action, such as keeping the lights on all night in an empty office building.
Is light pollution a unique situation that can only be found in Hong Kong?
The situation of light pollution is a serious problem occurred in the universe around us, usually happens in well-developed countries. Apart from Hong Kong, many asian countries also affected by this situation. Take Singapore as a case, Singapore is famous of it’s environmental policy and as the greenest city in the world, but was also declared the worst level of light pollution in the world. The National Environment Agency is in charge to enhance the environmental policy in Singapore, “Most polluted countries by population” figure is an research article from Science advances, and it states Singapore is the most polluted country in the world with a pollution level of 100 percent, countries whose populations are most exposed to light pollution.
The authors from Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute suggested to calculate light pollution based on the scale of streetlights of a country and the percentage of population exposed to the artificial brightness. Same as Hong Kong, the Singapore government has made policy on external use of lightings, however, the mandatory regulations or guidelines does not exists.
Paris is another city suffer from light pollution city in France, a city famous for neon signs, illuminated skyscraper. Differ from Hong Kong, in 2013, France Government lighting ordinances went into effect, from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m., shop lights are being turned off, and lights inside office buildings must be extinguished within an hour of workers leaving the premises. The lighting on France’s building facades cannot be turned on before sunset. Over the next two years, regulations restricting lighting on billboards will go into effect. These rules are designed to eventually cut carbon dioxide emissions by 250,000 tons per year, save the equivalent of the annual energy consumption of 750,000 households. In 2019 government establish National light pollution policy to control the light emission outdoor in it’s aim to reduce negative effects of the public and environment.
Using Mongkok as a case, illustrate how serious light pollution is in Hong Kong
Mongkok is one of the most crowded areas in Hong Kong, large proportion of area is suffering light illumination from the commercial signs and external lighting of sportsfills, it is a mixture of residential and commercial district with shops and restaurants. From the figure as below, survey conducted by Environmental Bureau, impacts of external lighting in Hong Kong, shows the sign lighting power density in Mongkok have exceeding the limit, states the number of illuminated signs were exceeding the limited of both internally and externally in Nathan road and Sai Yeung Choi Street area.
Hong Kong Night Sky Brightness Monitoring Network (NSN) established in order to monitor the condition of light pollution in Hong Kong, which covered a wide range of urban and rural settings, it’s duration is from 1 June 2010 to 31 August 2012.
Above figure was from the report of NSN, in different regions in Hong Kong the highest Night Sky Brightness (NSB) overall is from SpM (Salisbury Road) station and KP (King’s Park Metorological Station), both stations are from Yau Tsim Mong district.
Above figure shows the monthly variation of NSB of all stations, there were 4,089,239 individual data points collected from 18 monitoring stations since 2010. The variation may caused by visibility or the amount of clouds.1
Environment protection department (EPD) received certain amount of complaints about outdoor lighting in each of the year, a survey of light pollution in Hong Kong indicated the worst polluted urban areas such as Mong Kok, the night sky is at least 500 times brighter than the darkest sites in rural area. The fluorescent neon lights and advertising billboards in Mong Kok is our traditional street culture yet is a nightmare to the resident living nearby, all windows needed to be covered in order to have a supposingly dark environment for proper sleeping.
What should government do to ease the problem caused by light pollution
Hong Kong’s night time skyscraper is iconic and has been known as “Pearl of the Orient” yet we have the most serious light pollution in the world. Our famous world largest permanent laser light music show “A Symphony of Lights” performing daily for the tourists visiting our Pearl of the Orient, while it broke the Guinness World Record and bring us pride and numerous tourists, however, it also creates negative outcomes that are harmful to our extraordinary Victoria Harbour. Besides, there are conspicuous certainty that the show is wasting a lot of energy, resources and money which could be utilized in other more efficient ways.
Light pollution, more and more acknowledged by the public, and more and more complaints and reports about it in Hong Kong. Although the citizens reflected the problem of the pollution, but still have supporter, which is the business sector, argue it is necessary to maintain the famous skyline to attract tourists to visit. Government had policy to deal with light pollution, in 2016, Environment Bureau has launched the “Charter on External Lighting”. The policy is to invite stakeholders for external lighting installations to switch off unnecessary lights that may affect the outdoor environment from midnight to 7 a.m. on the following morning. To maintain and monitoring the effect of light pollution, government is encouraging people to grant more the funding on surveying in order to use as database on developing new rules and mandatory regulated to control the use of external lighting in Hong Kong.
In the survey of External lighting in Hong Kong, stated the awareness of stakeholders including shop owners, residents and building property management is increasing, 76% of residents of the survey reflected that the excessive lighting would cause negative impact to their everyday life, the majority are willing to take action in promoting energy conservation as to keep lighting pollution affect to minimum.
In my opinion, the Hong Kong government should educated citizens or regulated to perform reduce in light excessive consumption. Simply begin with reducing light consumption by switching off light is the most effective and most economical way, and by replacing the strong and flashy ones with a low-glare variety, LED lights, or installing motion sensors. Also, reduce the use of inefficient lighting installations such as decorative lighting and long operating hours during festive holidays.
Education in young generation is fundamental, to spread the impacts of light pollution
and to bring awareness to this growing problem and inspire more people to take the responsibility. Encourage them to understand the light pollution issue and to study the situation that it may brought to our earth. The problem of light pollution exists everywhere in the world and is still growing rapidly, it depends very much on the awareness of the public, especially on the next generation, they are the key decision makers of our future world. For that reason, it is important to continuously promote the awareness of light pollution and its effects.
Conclusion
When was the last time you saw a starry night sky, remembering how long ago that had been? The essay define light pollution and identify the problems that are damaging the ecosystem and will bring up physical issue on human. Apart from Hong Kong, French and Singapore are also affected by light pollution. Artificial outdoor light of Mongkok is very serious, some of the uses is not necessary. Government should takes the lead of monitoring by mandatory regulation and provide education to citizens. There is a reason for that, light pollution, primarily caused by the widespread lighting over the past years.