Thousands of cities around the globe turned off their lights for an hour to mark Earth Hour 2014, a symbolic show of support for the environment organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature.  Since the movement began in Sydney, Australia, in 2007, it has spread to more than 7,000 cities across more than 160 countries. Singapore continues to hold one of the world's largest lights-off events, drawing around 9,000 people this year to Marina Bay Sands, a commercial center typically awash in electricity.  To mark the event actors Andrew Garfield, Jamie Foxx, Emma Stone and a group of other famous stars from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 movie were in town.  Other iconic landmarks that fell dark included the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok's Wat Arun temple, the Empire State Building in New York, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Sydney Opera House, Red Square in Moscow, the Bird's Nest in Beijing and Hong Kong Harbor.       As the movement has grown, more organizations and business have committed to switching off their lights in support of efforts to reduce their environmental footprint. In Singapore, at least 600 organizations and companies agreed to either switch off their lights or participate in movements to use fewer plastic bags, take shorter showers, turn up their air-conditioning units or switch to LED lighting.  This year the World Wide Fund for Nature, which first launched worldwide Earth Hour, also launched Earth Hour Blue, a crowdfunding platform aimed at raising money for environmental projects around the globe. On Mar. 26 a project to stop the illegal wildlife trade in Asia by providing assistance to wildlife rangers became the first one to reach its target of $20,000 by relying completely on crowdfunding.  The hour-long event has little if any impact on electricity consumption, but as an awareness raising event it has registered success.  In a statement to mark Saturday's event, Andy Ridley, CEO and Co-Founder of Earth Hour, said Asia's rapidly growing digital presence is an added bonus that has helped power our movement. We can infer from the report that   _
Australia and Singapore were the first two countries to launch Earth Hour More than 7000 cities from 160 countries took part in Earth Hour 2014 Some famous movie stars from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were invited to Singapore to celebrate the event The World Wide Fund for Nature first organized Earth Hour worldwide