A Hole in the Sky: Ozone Depletion - A Landmark In International Diplomacy: The Montreal Protocol

CFCs and halons were widely used in thousands of products and represented a significant share of the international chemical industry, with billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Ozone depletion was a global problem that necessitated international cooperation, but nations mistrusted one another's motives. As with the issues of global warming and pollution, developing countries resented being asked to sacrifice their economic development for a problem they felt the industrialized nations had created. To complicate matters, gaps in scientific proof led to disagreements over whether a problem actually existed.

In 1985, as the first international response to the ozone threat, twenty nations signed an agreement in Vienna, Austria, calling for data gathering, cooperation, and a political commitment to take action at a later date. In 1987 negotiators meeting in Montreal, Canada, finalized a landmark in international environmental diplomacy: the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer. It is generally referred to as the Montreal Protocol. The agreement was signed by twenty-nine countries including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, all western European nations, the Russian Federation, and a handful of other countries around the world.

The agreement called for industrial countries to cut CFC emissions in half by 1998 and to reduce halon emissions to 1986 levels by 1992. Developing countries were granted deferrals to compensate for their low levels of production. Industrial countries agreed to reimburse developing countries that complied with the protocol for "all agreed incremental costs," meaning all additional costs above any they would have expected to incur had they developed their infrastructure in the absence of the accord. And, very importantly, the protocol also called for further amending as new data became available.

Although the ozone agreement was a major achievement in international negotiations, the world community could not enjoy the success for long. In 1991 new scientific information revealed that ozone depletion was occurring twice as fast as expected. This news spurred a call to again revise the treaty.

In 1992 representatives from eighty-seven nations met in Copenhagen, Denmark, to advance to January 1996 the deadline for halting production of CFCs. They agreed to halt the manufacture of new halon as of January 1994. (Developing nations were given a ten-year grace period to phase out manufacture of CFCs and halon.) A 1997 meeting in Montreal established deadlines for the phase-out of methyl bromide—2005 for developed nations and 2015 for developing countries. A deadline of 2015 was also set for developing nations to end production of methyl chloroform, which had been phased out by developed countries in 1996. The delegates also set a deadline for eliminating HCFCs. Their phaseout was to begin in 2004 and end no later than 2030. (See Table 3.2.)

The Montreal Protocol was hailed as an historic event—the most ambitious attempt ever to combat environmental degradation on a global scale. It ushered in a new era of environmental diplomacy. Some historians view the signing of the accord as a defining moment, the point at which the definition of international security was expanded to include environmental issues as well as military matters. In addition, an important precedent was established—that science and policymakers had a new relationship. Many observers thought that the decision to take precautionary action in the absence of complete proof of a link between CFCs and ozone depletion was an act of foresight that would now be possible with other issues.