March 2023 time change: why we’re still moving the clocks

Soon it will be that time again, summer time will start. On Sunday, March 26, 2023 the time change takes place. The bad news: it gets light later in the morning The good news: it doesn’t get dark until later in the evening.

Winter time has always been controversial, in the EU there has even been discussion for several years whether the time change should be abolished. More about the history behind the clock change, its pros and cons and when at the earliest it will be abolished can be found here:

Let’s start at the beginning. The idea of ​​daylight saving time was first documented in an essay by Benjamin Franklin in 1784. Night owl and late riser Franklin wrote the – rather ironically intended – letter to the editor of the «Journal de Paris» “An economic project”. In it he told the readers in a satirical way how many candles could be saved if it would be light for an extra hour in the evening.

The title of Franklin’s essay exemplifies what has always been the main driver of a time change: economic considerations. The idea attracted a lot of attention at the time, but it was mainly researchers and scientists who propagated it. The time change was initially not to the liking of the general public – too complicated, it was decided at the time.

Only with the outbreak of the First World War did the change of time gain a new impetus, because they wanted to save fuel for lighting, which was becoming scarce. Almost all parties involved in the war introduced summer time. After the end of the war, the war measure, sometimes unpopular with the population, was abolished in isolated cases, and the Second World War brought the clock back on the table in the summer.

In 1941 and 1942, Switzerland also briefly introduced the time change as a wartime measure. At the end of the 1970s, the oil crisis in Germany and Austria prompted renewed attempts to introduce summer time or a recurring changeover twice a year. Swiss politicians wanted to join However, the population thwarted its plans with a referendum and plebiscite.

When neighboring countries finally introduced the bi-annual time change in 1980, the problems became apparent. Switzerland as a so-called time island in the middle of Europe, where the clocks were set differently half the year, made the organization of Central European rail traffic considerably more difficult. On January 1, 1981, the time change also came into effect in Switzerland. A referendum did not take place and subsequent attempts to abolish it – for example by SVP father Christoph Blocher – also failed.

As early as the 1980s, the division into winter time or normal time and summer time was received negatively. “You almost never decide in Bonn [damals Hauptstadt der BRD, Anm. d. Red.] before the time change we will be in turmoil!”, the opponents got excited. At the time, the focus was that the SBB would have to suffer serious economic consequences if Switzerland did not also switch to summer time.

To make the transition as smooth as possible, it has been decided to move the time change to one weekend night. This time made the switchover easier for SBB, a large part of the population sleeps at this hour and latecomers still have time to adjust their clocks on Sunday.

Winter time, also known as common time, ends on Sunday and summer time begins. That means, we put the clock forward one hour – ie from 2am to 3am Most clocks change automatically. The bad news: With the time change, we’re losing the hour we lost in October.

PS: Anyone who starts a discussion every fall and spring about whether we gain or lose an hour can use the following mnemonic garden furniture serve as a reminder: in the spring this one for set the house (and clock accordingly) to one o’clock forposed), in the autumn the furniture (and the clocks per hour) will return yieldplaced.

In Switzerland, the arguments for the time change were always of a practical nature: the focus was on adaptation to the European standard. Summer time was introduced in Europe mainly for the economy. The question of whether this effectively saves energy has been re-examined in the course of the debate over its abolition in the EU, but studies have so far failed to provide a clear answer.

It is argued that although summer time actually means that less artificial light is needed in the evening, heating is done earlier in the autumn and spring. Some recent studies in Germany have concluded that the energy savings that can be achieved are marginal at best. In general, however, it is difficult to generalize findings. What applies to a small village in Norway does not necessarily apply to a town in southern Spain.

However, the study situation is also unclear because the generation of light and energy is constantly changing. There is now a new argument for summer: for photovoltaic plant owners, the possibility of using self-generated electricity is increasing. This is because power generation and user profile are better aligned in the evenings.

Some researchers would welcome the abolition of DST for health reasons. The changes over time – especially in the spring – cause some people to experience mini-jet lag and can cause trouble sleeping. But the time change can also have a negative effect on a biological level. Blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, but also the release of hormones, for example, follow an internal biological clock. If the daily rhythm changes, this can lead to adaptation difficulties and thus to complaints.

The study situation on health effects is essentially rather thin and contradictory. On the one hand, it seems confirmed that the hour less in the spring has greater consequences than the change from summer to winter time in the autumn. These are due to sleep deprivation, the traces of which apparently disappear after a week in most people. On the other hand, it can be shown that the different chronotypes – ie the categories into which people can be classified according to their preferred sleep-wake phases – respond differently. A study showed that late chronotypes – the so-called owls – sleep only briefly and do not adjust their activity patterns at all to the changed time and the new rhythm.

The then German governing party CDU decided in 2014 to campaign for the abolition of the switch. The EU only entered the scene in 2018. The EU Parliament has instructed the European Commission to reassess the time change in general. Then they started a survey. This was the result of an initial evaluation that 84 percent of the participants were in favor of abolishing it.

As a result, the EU planned to accommodate its citizens and abolish the division into summer and winter time after 2021. Both the European Commission and Parliament endorsed this roadmap. But then came the corona pandemic.

Since then, the clock has not moved much further in this area. The EU still faces a major problem with the question of the new normal time, namely whether to apply summer or winter time after the abolition.

But given that the EU has an underestimable east-west size, this decision is not entirely trivial. For example, if one agreed on summer time, it would be dark in western Europe until just before 10 a.m. in winter. If, on the other hand, winter time were permanent, the east would have a “problem” – in Poland, for example, it would be light at 3 a.m. in summer.

Although the EU strives for uniform implementation, each EU country must decide for itself whether it wants to live in perpetual summer time or normal time in the future. That is why the European Council – the body of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union – has been obliged to decide on this since 2019. But the worm has been there for a while and the agenda item is being pushed further and further. There is no deadline for the European Council to agree on a position, as an EU Parliament spokeswoman explained to Watson.

Regardless of how the EU decides – Switzerland will probably (or not) follow suit. As with the adjustment to Europe when it was introduced, today it wouldn’t make sense to simply keep the time change twice a year.

Only about a third of all states have committed to daylight saving time. This includes most European and North American countries. The time change also exists in Israel, Syria, Iran, Peru, Paraguay, Bahamas, Bermuda, Cuba, Mexico and parts of Australia. The fact that not all countries have daylight saving time may mean that the time in the same time zone is not the same throughout the year. This map gives an overview: