The Earth at Night: Where the World Lit Up and Where It Went Dark, from Satellite Night Lights 2012 to 2024

I measure how the world's artificial light at night changed between 2012 and 2024, using the Annual VIIRS Night Lights (VNL) V2 as prepared by Hengl in a consistent yearly stack, summed as radiance times area over countries, World Bank regions and the 20 km around 1,007 cities of at least half a million people. After correcting a tenfold change of storage scale between the 2021 and 2022 layers of that release, the light seen from space rose by 57% between 2012 and 2024 (41% between the three-year averages at either end), and the land area that averaged at least 1 nW/cm²/sr grew by 61%. China and India gave 26% of the increase; South Asia's light grew fastest of any region (159%), while sub-Saharan Africa, home to 14% of the world's people, still gave off only 2.6% of its light. Of 141 countries with at least a million people, 47 at least doubled their light, led by Nepal (9.3 times), Cambodia (7.0) and Ghana (6.4), and 17 lost light. The deepest falls follow war (Ukraine 73% between 2021 and 2022; Syria, Yemen, and Khartoum after 2023) and economic or power crises (Lebanon 71% between 2019 and 2022; Venezuela 41% between 2014 and 2020). A third group of falls, in France (-40%), the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, most likely reflects the change from sodium lamps to LEDs, to which the sensor is partly blind, and lights switched off after midnight, not a darker night on the ground. Modelled years back to 2000 are shown for orientation only; they do not join the observations. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/earth-at-night/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/earth-at-night. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/earth-at-night/. Text, figures and derived data: CC BY 4.0; code: MIT. Night lights: Annual VIIRS Night Lights V2 (Earth Observation Group, Colorado School of Mines; Elvidge et al. 2021) as prepared by Hengl (Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.7750174, CC BY 4.0); countries, populations and places: Natural Earth (public domain).