Some countries like Spain, Greece, and Finland have multiple internal time zones creating confusion. The time zones progressively move ahead when traveling east with zones like Moscow Time (MSK) and areas that are three hours ahead of UTC. It creates a one hour difference from CET. This time is known as Eastern European Time (EET) and overlaps with major eastern cities such as Warsaw, Prague, and Athens.
Moving east, the Eastern European Time Zone has many major countries like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, and Finland. It covers a large portion of the central EU and matches the time in continental European cities like Paris, Rome and Barcelona. This time zone is often simply called Central European Time (CET). It is one hour ahead of UTC and aligned with countries on the Greenwich Meridian. The main time zone in Europe is the Western European Time Zone which includes the UK, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy. Understanding Europe's time zones helps when planning travel across this diverse region. The UK, France, Spain and Benelux countries would be under the same Western European Time Zone.With over 40 countries, Europe spans multiple time zones that can differ by several hours. 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.