The most important international environmental agreement of all time shows how collaboration and cooperation can produce real results. But the impact could soon stall for entirely avoidable reasons.
The ozone layer is recovering. And this monumental feat — which required a global treaty on ending the use of harmful gases such as CFCs — is reason enough to celebrate.
Without taking better care of the stratosphere, humans and other living species on Earth would be more exposed to harmful solar radiation from the sun. In turn, this dramatically increases the risk of developing serious health conditions, such as cancer, and threatens other factors such as agricultural crop yield.
Based on current progress, the ozone layer could be back at 1980 levels by 2040, after the introduction of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to try and halt its depletion. However, scientists are now observing more damaging substances in the atmosphere than expected, with some attributing this to suspected leakages from feedstocks. Based on calculations by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), if leakage is at the higher rate of their estimations, ozone recovery could be delayed by seven years at least.
‘We’ve realized in the last few years that these feedstock chemicals are a bug in the system,’ said one of there study’s authors, Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry at MIT, who was on of the original research team that linked the chemicals to the ozone hole. ‘Production of ozone-depleting substances has pretty much ceased around the world except for this one use, which is when you have a chemical you convert into something else.’
According to AGAGE — the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment — recent years have now seen researchers revise upwards their estimates of feedstock leakage of ozone-harming emissions. Now at around 3.6%, for some individual chemicals attributed to depletion, the number is even higher.
Based on this modelling comparing this to a scenario of 0.5% leakage from 2025 onwards, taking into account production trends, total emissions reduction would fall until 2045, but then level off. At which point there would only be a 50% reduction through to the end of this century, meaning 1980 ozone health levels would only return by 2073, not 2066.
‘We’ve gotten to the point where, if we want the protocol to be as successful in the future as it has been in the past, the parties really need to think about how to tighten up the emissions of these industrial processes,’ added first author Stefan Reimann of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology.
Image: Blair Fraser / Unsplash
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