Clocks are set back an hour this Sunday morning. With this change, in Mainland Portugal and in the Autonomous Region of Madeira, clocks must be set back one hour, when they are 02:00 am, to 01:00 am. In the Autonomous Region of the Azores, the change will be made at 01:00, moving to 00:00.
The current time change regime is regulated by a Community directive of 2000 and provides that, every year, clocks are, respectively, set forward and back one hour on the last Sunday in March and on the last Sunday in October, marking the beginning and the end of summer time.
However, according to Jornal de Notícias, a group of international experts is against changing the time in the European Union (EU), defending the alignment of time zones in different countries, bringing them as close as possible to solar time and making them permanent.
According to experts from more than 70 international institutions, who signed the Barcelona Declaration on Time Policies, changes to the legal time “do not have a significant effect on energy savings”, while keeping the same time “improves health, economy, safety and the environment”.
Arguments also shared by the Associação Portuguesa do Sono, which for years has advocated the adoption of winter time as the time that best suits Portuguese children and adults.
“This change does not only change the time that the hands mark, but also has repercussions on human beings, who have to adapt their internal clock”, says the association, adding that “adaptation to this time transition varies between people, It may take up to a week for the adjustment to be made.”
In the coming days, children, “who tend to wake up very early, may wake up, at the new time, an hour earlier, making it difficult for parents to sleep”.
The experts who signed the Barcelona Declaration propose, as a first step, that all EU countries end the time change in spring (summer time, when the clock hands are advanced 60 minutes) and continue with the time winter. Countries whose recommended time zone is their current standard time would not have to make any changes.
Then, in a second step, countries whose recommended time zone does not match their standard time, such as Portugal, Spain, Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, would set the clock hands back one last time in the autumn, in order to be able to adopt the recommended time zone as your new standard time.
The Azores are always one hour less than the mainland and Madeira.
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