Welcome to the Earth Hour global community!

152 countries and territories and more than 6,700 cities, towns and municipalities took part in the biggest Earth Hour event on March 31 at 8:30PM. Whilst there were some incredible stories we’ve reported in the past two weeks that capture the hope and strength of the movement, there’s one telling reason that you’ll be hearing much more from Earth Hour in 2012.

More than 200,000 people accepted an IWIYW challenge on YouTube.com/EarthHour over the Earth Hour weekend - effectively committing to take their action for the environment well beyond the hour. All 60 Earth Hour feature challenges have been accepted on YouTube, so everyone can expect to see their favourite challenges completed – from Miranda Kerr conducting a yoga class to Kumi Naidoo dying his beard green at Rio+20. We can’t wait.

But it wasn’t just via YouTube that the I Will If You Will campaign took off. In Indonesia, there was a huge localised grassroots campaign of communities pledging their action for the “Ini Aksiku! Mana Aksimu?” campaign on the streets across the archipelago, evidence of which can be found via inspiring images on Tumblr, Flickr and Twitter.  In the Philippines, creative posters gave a fresh take on IWIYW – what could a tree do if more of us agreed to cycle? From South Africa to the UAE, Mexico to Croatia – a universal call to action was put out by individuals, organisations, businesses and governments from around the world.

As Earth Hour made its journey across the globe, there was united response to accept the challenge to Dare the World to Save the Planet. This year more than ever, countries, cities and communities took ownership of what their Earth Hour was all about - Greece asked what else could be saved if we protected nature, locals in Tripoli and Benghazi celebrated the opportunity to create environmental awareness in a country that was a war zone just months ago, Italy asked its population to confess its “green sins” and China reminded us that “There’s an environmentalist in each of us”.

But every individual has their own take on Earth Hour. Our aim is to create an interconnected global community committed to sharing their ideas and resources for a better planet. This year the world has been inspired by each of you who shared your vision, big or small, for our planet.

The top two worldwide twitter trends were fan initiated – as the hour of inspiration hit Southeast Asia, Happy Earth Hour was the number one term on the microblogging site, with the #KilltheLightsBritney hash-tag in the Philippines becoming the #2 top trend. Overall, Earth Hour related terms trended in a total of 28 countries on Twitter - another record for the campaign.

On Instagram, more than 7000 images tagged #EarthHour were uploaded from all corners of the globe, as people took to the fun app to share their inspirational moments via iPhoneography. The Earth Hour 2012 Flickr page had more than 2000 images uploaded, the best of which can be seen here.

There has also been some beautiful time-lapse photography we’ve shared via Facebook and Tumblr, from cities that truly powered down for Earth Hour – a powerful visual reminder of our collective impact.

So wherever you were for Earth Hour 2012, your stories inspired the world. We have created an extraordinary interconnected global community - now we need to take action, so stay tuned and continue to share what it is you’re willing to do to protect the environment... I Will If You Will.