Some European countries that observe DST include the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Portugal.Įurope is a diverse continent with a rich history and culture. This is done to make better use of sunlight during the longer days of summer. Note that many European countries observe Daylight Saving Time ( DST), which temporarily shifts the standard time in a region by one hour during certain parts of the year. UTC+05:00: This time zone is observed in Western Asia, including Azerbaijan and Turkey.UTC+04:00: This time zone is observed in Eastern Europe, including Armenia and Georgia.UTC+03:00: This time zone is observed in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine.UTC+02:00: This time zone is observed in Eastern Europe, including Bulgaria and Romania.UTC+01:00: This time zone is observed in Western and Central Europe, including France, Germany, and Italy.Some of the major time zones in Europe are: The UK, France, Spain and Benelux countries would be under the same Western European Time Zone.Europe is a continent located in the northern hemisphere and is divided into a number of different time zones. This is what they say is the best for our collective health," she added. And also because this is the way that chronobiology is, that is the science that studies how our internal rhythm affects our health. This way we can make the most of our life hours. "These guarantee that each country has the sun in its highest position at noon.
"These four time zones are the ones that best align our social time, our clock, with what we call the natural time - so the geographically correct time if you want," Guell explained. The initiative has come up with its own proposal that would see European countries split into four different time zones, mostly based on the current winter time. And right now, the European system has to deal with a lot," he added.ĮU leaders are currently wrestling with Russia's war in Ukraine which has pushed energy and food prices to new highs, hitting European consumers and businesses hard and threatening to push the economy into recession.īefore that, it was COVID-19 and its successive, unrelenting waves that left over a million people dead in the EU alone and an economy on tenterhooks.Ĭoordination is essential to ensure that direct neighbours sharing meridians choose the same standard time and to, therefore, "avoid a patchwork of time zones so that it's more or less sorted out in a way that looks homogeneous, that doesn't disrupt the market and the trade between member states," Ariadna Guell, coordinator of Barcelona Time Use Initiative for a Healthy Society, told Euronews. Not to talk about Brexit, but one of the biggest examples is that it's been very difficult for UK politics to handle other societal changes while Brexit was happening. "The political system cannot handle all things at once. "There is a bandwidth issue," Jakop Dalunde, a Swedish MEP (Greens/EFA), and shadow rapporteur on the proposal to discontinue the seasonal changes of time, told Euronews.
The proposal was then rubber-stamped by MEPs in the first half of 2019. The European Commission unveiled its proposal to abolish the time change in September 2018 following a public consultation in which an overwhelming majority of the 4.6 million European citizens who took part called for the practice to be brought to an end.