Recent decades have seen a revolution in our understanding of how light affects health and wellbeing. We now know that the lighting conditions we experience in our daily lives have profound implications for all. Nonetheless, the application of this carefully gathered knowledge has lagged behind. Given that people in high-income countries spend more than 90% of their time indoors under electric lighting, the importance of light and lighting in improving public health has never been greater.
A novel expert consensus bridges this gap and offers 26 statements on the effects of light on human physiology and health. The statements, developed using a consensus process, cover everything from the fundamentals of physics as they apply to the lit environment, the underlying human neural anatomy and physiology, the effect of light on circadian clocks, melatonin and alertness, and the need to perform more research in this area.
This effort, the Light for Public Health Initiative, emerged from the Ladenburg Roundtable Light for health and wellbeing – from mechanisms to policy, held in April 2024, which brought together internationally renowned experts in this area to review challenges and opportunities for the application of scientific knowledge on this topic to the real world, resulting in a White Paper proposing a coordinated approach to evidence-based public health messaging.
The project is supported by five international organizations: the International Commission on Illumination (CIE), the Society for Light, Rhythms, and Circadian Health (SLRCH), the Daylight Academy (DLA), the Good Light Group (GLG), and the Center for Environmental Therapeutics (CET), which together span science, standards, architecture, and health.
The Light for Public Health Initiative responds to a pressing need: translating the findings from many preclinical, clinical, and epidemiological studies into actionable items for the real world and making the public aware that their daily light diets influence their wellbeing just as do nutritious food, sleep and exercise. While we understand the underlying biology more and more, there remains a significant gap: making the knowledge useful for other stakeholders. The consensus statements are written for multipliers and stakeholders in the domain of public health.
With a formal launch on UNESCO’s International Day of Light (16 May 2025), the campaign aims to reshape how we think about and design for healthy light exposure in our homes, schools, workplaces and cities.
Website: https://lightforpublichealth.org/
Jennifer A. Veitch PhD, FRSC (President, International Commission on Illumination)
Manuel Spitschan PhD (Convenor of the Ladenburg Roundtable on Light for Health and Wellbeing)
Picture by Valeria Boltneva on Pexels
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