By NGUHER KENDRA ITYOACHIMIN, from Bournemouth –
Daylight saving time, also known as summer time, refers to the act of advancing clocks to make better use of the longer daylight available during summer, so darkness falls at a later clock time.
This practice of changing clocks is not observed in places with high latitudes, where an hour clock shift will provide little benefit because of the wide variations in sunrise and sunset times, only a fraction of the world’s population use it, it is observed only by some Australian states and all states in the US except Hawaii and a part of Arizona.
Summer time is implemented in the United Kingdom, where the clocks spring forward by one hour and in autumn they fall back by one hour. According to the UK government, each year, clocks go forward 1 hour at 1am on the last Sunday in March and move back 1 hour at 2am on the last Sunday in October.
In the UK, on the 31st of March 2024, the clocks went forward by an hour signaling the beginning of the British Summer time and the end of the Greenwich Mean Time. This custom of clocks changing is to provide people with more daylight in the evenings and less in the mornings, this will be good news for people, especially Nigerians who have friends or families living in the United Kingdom who now share the same time zone as the clocks have gone forward. Meanwhile on the 27th of October 2024 the clocks will fall back by one hour.
History of Daytime Savings
The idea of changing clocks was a part of ancient societies like Rome where they adopted seasonal changes to their time keeping to make better use of daylight. In 1784, Benjamin Franklin made a suggestion in the Journal de Paris that Parisians could wake up earlier in the summer to economize on oil and candle usage, but he did not propose changing clocks.
According to a report by the Royal Meteorological Society, the idea of the British Summer Time otherwise known as Daylight Savings was proposed in 1907 by William Willet, a builder and horse rider, who did not like the idea of ‘wasting daylight’. He advocated for advancing clocks forward to encourage people get out of bed earlier and enable them spend more time outdoors but it was not implemented until 1916. The British government later adopted this system of adjusting clocks during the first world war after Germany and Anglo-Hungarian empires to save fuel and reduce the demand for coal during the energy crisis of the 1970s
While speaking to Nigerians living in the UK on the possible effects of Daytime Savings on their lives.
Tosin Aremu, a resident of Bournemouth, who came into the UK last year said that she found the concept of daylight savings interesting when she arrived.
According to her, “I personally did not feel the effects of daylight savings but for me I think it it’s a good thing because it helps me to stay productive because when it gets darker quickly during the winter, I feel more sleepy and unable to do any work but when it’s summer and lighter in the evenings I am able to get more work done even in the evenings”.
Another Nigerian, Esther Chinenye also a resident of Bournemouth, was of the view that it didn’t have any adverse effects on her.
She said, “I don’t think it has affected my day to day activities, since my life is fixed and static, I work at the same times everyday but I prefer the summer time where we have lighter evenings compared to winter when it gets dark earlier”.
Ayodeji Agun, another Nigerian UK resident said he found it challenging because he couldn’t understand why it would get dark at 5pm and he found himself sleeping almost all the time because of daylight savings.
Although proponents of DST argue that it saves energy, promotes outdoor leisure activity in the evening (in summer), and therefore has a positive impact on human health, experts have raised some serious concerns over the years.
For instance, scientists believe that clock-shifts disrupt human circadian rhythms, a reference to the normal cycle of human internal body activity. As such, they say, it affects human health negatively. Numerous studies have shown that the yearly DST clock-shifts can increase health risks such as heart attack, and traffic accidents, including a 2017 study published in the American Economic Journal.
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