2024-10-24 06:49:00
On the morning of Sunday 27 October, people across Europe will turn their clocks back an hour, bringing brighter mornings and darker evenings.
This means people will gain an hour of sleep on Sunday – good news if you’ve been to an early Halloween party – and marks the end of daylight saving time.
Announcement
But shouldn’t this have changed? What happened to the idea that circulated in the European Union a few years ago of no longer having these biannual seasonal time changes?
The most successful public consultation
In 2018, the European Commission launched a public consultation asking people what they thought about eliminating the time change.
It was the most successful European consultation ever: 4.6 million people participated, in some cases representing a significant share of the national population (3.79% for Germany and 2.94% for Austria).
The vast majority of people said they wanted to stop moving their clocks forward and backward every six months: in fact 84% of those interviewed agreed with the proposal.
Negative health impacts, including sleep disorders, lack of energy conservation and increased road accidents were the most common reasons justifying the idea.
On this basis, in 2018 the Commission proposed legislation to put an end to seasonal time changes. This had to be approved by the European Parliament and the national governments represented in the Council of the EU.
THE European Parliament in 2019 it supported the proposal by a large majority suggesting that the time changes should be eliminated in 2021.
But EU governments have failed to reach an agreement. Should summer or winter become the norm? How to coordinate change between neighboring countries to avoid a patchwork of different time zones? And who would benefit most?
Brexit and the pandemic also got in the way. With the UK leaving the European Union and unlikely to follow new EU rules, abolishing the time change would have left the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in different time zones for half the year.
There was also little support for the idea in some countries: in Cyprus, Greece and Malta less than half of the consultation participants agreed.
Announcement
The last time the issue was discussed in the EU Council was in December 2019. The countries then called on the European Commission to produce an “impact assessment” of the proposal before it could decide. Then Covid-19 arrived and the pandemic overshadowed the discussion.
Why change the time?
Time changes, adopted by around 70 countries, have a long history.
Daylight saving time (DST) was introduced in several countries, including Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, during World War I to save energy by delaying the turning on of lights in the evening.
The agreements were abandoned after the wars but were revived in the 1970s to deal with the oil crisis. Italy introduced summer time in 1966, Greece in 1971, the United Kingdom and Ireland in 1972, Spain in 1974 and France in 1976.
Since 2001, an EU directive has forced EU member states to move clocks forward by one hour on the last Sunday in March and back on the last Sunday in October. In the early 1990s, countries changed their clocks on different dates, which posed complications for transportation, communications and cross-border trade.
But does the system really guarantee energy savings today?
Several evaluations have found the benefits to be “marginal.” One study estimates energy savings of between 0.5% and 2.5%, also depending on the geography, climate, economic and cultural factors of the country.
Announcement
In general, it appears that Southern countries are the most advantaged, although gains are potentially reduced by technological advances, such as energy-efficient devices. In other words, there is not just one factor to consider and the results achieved in some countries do not necessarily apply to others.
What happens next?
The debate on seasonal time changes has been somewhat revived due to the energy crisis. In March 2022, the United States Senate passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent starting in November 2023, although it has not yet been fully ratified.
In the summer of 2022, Italian media suggested that the discussion could also resume in the EU.
However, a spokesperson for the Council of the EU recently told The Local that there is nothing new on the agenda.
“The Council has not yet formed its position on the Commission’s proposal,” he said in an email.
However, in March 2024, the chair of the European Parliament’s Internal Market Committee, German Green MEP Anna Cavazzini, urged EU member states to finally reach a common position on the issue.
“At the end of this parliamentary term, it is unfortunately clear that the abolition of the time change has become a failure in Council,” he said.
“To avoid further frustration, the Council must finally untie the Gordian knot of Member States’ divergent opinions and take a stand.
“This means that we can finally make progress with ordinary legislation. The time between the European elections and the Commission’s new work program would leave enough space for this this summer. This way, the EU can keep its promise, long overdue, to abolish time modification.”
At the time of writing, however, the Gordian knot remains tangled.
In 2024, the switch to daylight saving time occurred at 2 a.m. on Sunday, March 31, then the clocks will change again on Sunday, October 27, this time moving back one hour.
#happened #EUs #plan #stop #changing #clock