Earth Hour 2017 celebrity ambassadors announced in Karachi

Anoushey Ashraf, Adnan Malik, Khalid Malik appointed celebrity ambassadors for WWF-P's awareness campaign

KARACHI: The World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-Pakistan) officially inaugurated Earth Hour 2017 at Alliance Francaise de Karachi on Wednesday by unveiling its celebrity ambassadors for the largest volunteer movement across the world. The theme for the current year is 'Shine a Light on Climate Change'.

Earth Hour 2017 celebrities included actor, model and documentary filmmaker Adnan Malik, VJ and model Anoushey Ashraf and actor, radio host and singer Khalid Malik.

Speaking on the occasion, WWF-Pakistan's Sindh and Balochistan regional head, Ali Dehlavi, said that climate change poses a fundamental threat to everything around us. Melting glaciers, rising sea levels and new and more frequent weather extremes such as heatwaves and super floods will spare no continent.

Referring to a study titled 'Climate Change Adaptation in the Indus Ecoregion', he shared that one of the key findings of the study was that climate change will likely have a large cost on agricultural productivity in Pakistan. In particular, assuming a 0.5oC increase in average nationwide temperatures, an 8% to 10% loss is expected by 2040 across all crops corresponding to Rs30,000 per acre.

Earth Hour is the world's largest grassroots movement to combat climate change. It started from Sydney, Australia, in 2007 and has grown to become a global movement that now involves every continent across the globe.

Earth Hour invites people everywhere to voluntarily switch off all unnecessary lights for one hour as a symbolic act to show their commitment to saving the planet. In 2016, 178 countries and territories participated in Earth Hour celebrations, with more than 400 iconic landmarks switching off lights, cementing Earth Hour's place as the largest grassroots campaign in history. Earth Hour 2017 will be observed on Saturday, March 25, from 8:30pm till 9:30pm all over the world.