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JANUARY 2022 LIGHTING JOURNAL
Covid-19 may have had all the attention for the past two years, but it was only right it was the climate emergency, and how lighting can respond, that was centre stage at the ILP’s first inperson CPD event post pandemic, which coincided with the COP26 summit By Nic Paton
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CLIMATE CHANGE
or those of us living comfortable lives in developed western Europe, the reality of climate change and global heating can sometimes feel far removed, whether we’re talking about retreating glaciers in the Himalayas or Antarctica, wildfires in Australia or Siberia, or floods in, say, Bangladesh. However, it is fair to say the reality of how – and just how fast – our planet is changing did begin to feel scarily closer to home at times last year. There were the raging wildfires in Greece and Turkey, floods in Scotland, Cumbria and on the London Underground (among other parts of the UK), vicious and seemingly more frequent storms and, of course, the catastrophic flooding across Europe, especially in Germany, over the summer. As Nigel Harvey, chief executive of Recolight and standing beneath an image of the devastation in Germany, put it at the ILP’s special sustainability CPD afternoon in November: ‘Two hundred people died. Roads were blocked by the flotsam and jetsam of the flooding; bridges were swept away. I could have chosen images of the town of Lytton in Canada, which hit 49.6oC – in Canada! – and then burnt to the ground. Or I could have chosen images of the hurricane hitting New York that left dozens dead and subways flooded. And
