Spotlight is an SNF Sinergia project, offering a scientific platform to establish a future-oriented, sustainable outdoor lighting infrastructure and to contribute to updating and optimizing current lighting practices and standards. The project draws on the latest developments in light sensory developments and LED technology and leverages promising options to mitigate negative impacts of light pollution on the ecological environment while meeting human needs for safety, aesthetics, and well-being. With a strong, interdisciplinary consortium of lighting engineers and computer specialists, ecologists, and social scientists, we are making an essential contribution to a more evidence-based debate on light pollution.

Spotlight aims and outcomes

Spotlight is an interdisciplinary scientific project offering opportunities and synergies to fill gaps in existing knowledge of light pollution, light impact on ecological systems, human well-being, and perception in a concerted action, integrating state-of-the-art technological knowledge for designing sustainable outdoor lighting pathways. The overall project objective is: based on Spotlight's findings, current outdoor lighting regulations, policies, and practices will be supplemented or optimized to enable a sustainable outdoor lighting infrastructure based on new developments in LED lighting technology - with the goal of minimizing the impact of outdoor lighting emissions on the ecological environment while addressing human preferences, aesthetics, well-being, and safety.

To this end, Spotlight addresses a range of technical and thematic gaps 1) evaluated light-technical protocols and instrumentation to quantify light pollution at the local and the landscape scale; 2) flexible and mobile light measurement devices for innovative ecological impact assessments to infer movement behavior under light exposure; 3) evaluated response patterns and thresholds of ecological (invertebrate) communities to light exposure with the goal of determining adaptations and thresholds at different levels ranging from functional interactions (light-related traits, trophic interactions, e.g., plant-insect, insect-predator), light-induced changes in community composition (flight-active and ground-dwelling invertebrates) to ecosystem services; 4) to evaluate human well-being and perception (aesthetic, safety) in different lighting conditions, and to assess the awareness of light pollution in the general public; 5) to fully integrate the social evaluation and ecological impacts into light planner’s models for 6) updating of current norms and into light planning and developing scenarios and pathways towards sustainable outdoor lighting infrastructure.