Energy & Environment

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18 October 2007
Montreal Protocol Could Be Model for Addressing Climate Change

By Cheryl Pellerin
USINFO Staff Writer

This is the second article in a two-part series about the Montreal Protocol and stratospheric ozone.

Washington -- The 20-year-old Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, hailed as a success so far by scientists and governments, was designed to accommodate new scientific knowledge and the wide-ranging economic realities of developed and developing nations.

The agreement -- ratified by 191 countries to help protect the ozone layer, Earth’s protection in the stratosphere against the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation -- according to some scientists is a good model for dealing with another environmental problem: climate change and the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases.

“What was very interesting is that the protocol itself called for periodic re-evaluation of the science,” Guy Brasseur, associate director of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in the Earth and Sun Systems Laboratory, told USINFO. “It was not a frozen protocol, it was a protocol that could evolve with time based on new information that would come from the science. This was unique.”

In 1974, scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions were depleting ozone in the stratosphere. In the 1980s, scientists observed a thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica that people called an ozone hole. In 1987, some 24 countries signed the first version of the Montreal Protocol. (See related article.)

Countries that have ratified the protocol commit to meeting strict, time-bound reduction objectives for each of nearly 100 substances controlled by the treaty. Such substances contain the ozone-depleting chemicals bromine and chlorine, and include CFCs and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs).

In the 1990s, HCFCs were considered transition chemicals for use as CFC substitutes because they were less effective at depleting ozone than CFCs. But HCFCs also are scheduled to be phased out under the protocol by 2030 in developed countries and 2040 in developing countries.

LIVING DOCUMENT

Since January 1989, when the pact entered into force, representatives of the parties to the Montreal Protocol met 19 times in different countries, most recently in Montreal, September 12-21.

At that meeting, after a proposal and strong endorsement by the United States, the treaty’s 191 parties agreed to speed up by a decade the phase-out of the ozone-depleting HCFCs. The final agreement combined options proposed by Argentina and Brazil; Norway and Switzerland; the United States; and Mauritania, Mauritius and the Federated States of Micronesia.

Specifically, the parties agreed that developing countries will push forward their baseline HCFC production and consumption from 2015 to 2009-2010 and freeze HCFC production and consumption in 2013 rather than in 2016.

Developing countries will reduce HCFC production and consumption by 10 percent in 2015, 35 percent in 2020 and 67.5 percent in 2025, with a phase-out in 2030. Developed countries will phase out HCFC production by 2020 and reduce HCFC consumption by 75 percent in 2010 and 90 percent in 2015, with a phase-out in 2020.

The overall effect will be to reduce ozone-depleting chemical emissions by about 47 percent.

“When you think about the climate issue, which is another environmental issue,” Brasseur said, “you wonder if the people dealing with that shouldn’t learn a bit about the successful story of ozone research, depletion and recovery.”

IMPORTANT MODEL

Since 1990, to help developing nations meet their reduction obligations under the environmental treaty, the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol and four implementing agencies -- the U.N. Environment Programme, the U.N. Development Programme, the U.N. Industrial Development Organization and the World Bank -- have provided support.

By the end of 2005, the fund had approved more than 5,000 projects and activities in more than 140 countries. Those efforts, when fully implemented, are expected to eliminate annual consumption of nearly 224,000 metric tons and annual production of nearly 138,000 metric tons of ozone-depleting substances.

“The developed world took the responsibility to help developing countries,” Anne Douglass, deputy project scientist for NASA’s Aura spacecraft, told USINFO, “and that’s a really important model.” Aura instruments monitor the atmosphere’s chemical composition and gather data that help researchers better understand ozone chemistry through computer models.

The multilateral fund was the first financial mechanism to be created under an international treaty.

As part of the September agreement, the parties concurred that funding for developing countries from the multilateral fund will be stable and sufficient to enable those nations to comply with the accelerated phase-out.

“It is very unique,” Richard Stolarski, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland told USINFO, “that the countries of the world can put together a protocol that involves developing to developed to in-between, to equatorial and high-latitude to island nations, and they all come together every few years to discuss in a rational way what is perceived to be something that will make the world a better place. That’s a rare thing.”

More information about the Montreal Protocol is available on the UNEP Web site. For additional information on achievement in protecting the ozone layer, see the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Web site.

See also “Effect of Climate Change on Recovery of Ozone Hole Remains Unclear.”

(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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