U.S. climate emissions have already begun to come down, currently resting at their lowest point in a decade and a half. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 27 2013 (IPS)

The United States has formally told the United Nations that it is on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 17-percent by the end of the decade, assuming that currently proposed regulations are implemented.

That figure would be in line with a central goal President Barack Obama laid out in a watershed climate-focused plan unveiled in June. While environmentalists have been generally supportive of that initiative, known as the Climate Action Plan, the 17-percent goal (to be reduced below 2005 levels) has struck some as too cautious.“Other nations like Mexico, China and those in the E.U. are watching closely to see whether the U.S. will make good on its promises." -- Lou Leonard of WWF

On Thursday the United States handed over two reports to the United Nations, one charting the country’s progress on cutting emissions and a second that, for the first time, forecasts estimated future improvement. The reports come a day before a U.N. panel is set to unveil its fifth major update analysis on the causes and ramifications of climate change.

“This biennial report is the first ever of its kind, and will serve as a benchmark for other countries, and will hold them accountable for action on climate change,” Heather Zichal, President Obama’s top aide on climate change, told an audience here on Wednesday.

“The world looks to the United States for leadership on climate change, and we feel we must deliver it both at home and abroad … In his speech [in June], President Obama made clear that if Congress wouldn’t take action on climate change, put our nation on the path to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020, he would.”

While the United Nations has required four-yearly reporting on countries’ existing emissions-reduction policies, the United States was reportedly central in pushing the new biennial, forward-looking reporting on what countries are planning to do to combat climate change. (The U.S. biennial report is actually still in draft form, open to public comment through late October.)

The reports find that U.S. climate emissions have already begun to come down, currently resting at their lowest point in a decade and a half. Officials now estimate a range of potential emissions cuts by 2020 – depending on how implementation of regulations proceeds, greenhouse gases could come down by 14 to 20 percent below 2005 levels.

Under the hood

To get anywhere near those levels, the administration says the country will need to impose restrictions on the carbon output of both new and current power plants. It will also need to ratchet up energy efficiency standards while tamping down on two particularly noxious gases, methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

U.S. regulators have taken initial steps on several of these issues, most recently last week’s proposal to significantly limit carbon emissions from current power plants (a similar proposal for current power plants is expected next June). Yet nearly all of these regulatory measures remain highly controversial, with the business lobby and Republican lawmakers offering varying levels of pushback.

“Today’s report provides a first chance to look under the hood of the President’s Climate Action Plan,” Lou Leonard, head of climate change programmes for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), said Thursday.

“Other nations like Mexico, China and those in the E.U. are watching closely to see whether the U.S. will make good on its promises and show global leadership. As the first-of-its-kind report under new international guidelines, the assessment should set a strong example of transparency and thoroughness.”

Leonard noted that the report shows the 17 percent target is “achievable but by no means yet certain”.

Further, implementation of many of these regulations will require significant cooperation with local-level forces.

“To ensure we reach and surpass the 2020 goals, action in U.S. cities and counties is another critical piece of the puzzle, and hundreds of communities are doing their part by strengthening building codes, promoting clean energy and building smarter transportation,” said Brian Holland, director of climate programmes at ICLEI USA, a network of 450 local governments.

“Federal collaboration and support for local government action has been instrumental in achieving emissions reductions in leading cities. Much more will be necessary to stabilise global climate in the long run.”

Schizophrenic approach

Others are questioning both Obama’s goal and his route to achieving it. Currently the president’s energy approach is known broadly as “all of the above”, a catchphrase meant to suggest (particularly to conservatives) that he will not be making ideologically driven energy decisions.

Yet a rising chorus has warned that continued reliance on fossil fuels is undercutting the quick scale-up in renewable energy technologies that many feel is necessary to make real progress on cutting U.S. – and global – carbon emissions.

This is particularly true with regard to the new surfeit of cheap U.S. natural gas following the introduction of technologies allowing for a process known as hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”). While this glut has accounted for much of the United States’ dip in emissions in recent years, as gas has increasingly supplanted coal, it has also come to define U.S. energy policy for the foreseeable future.

“You can’t solve climate change with an ‘all of the above’ approach – you have to go ‘all in’ on a clean energy future. The White House continues to have a schizophrenic approach to climate policy,” Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“On the one hand, the Obama administration is taking important steps forward with investments in renewable energy and the recent power plant regulations. On the other, they’re letting fracking go unregulated, still deliberating on the Keystone XL [crude oil] pipeline, and weakening key international climate policies.”

While the United States set records last year for new wind power installations – and is setting similar records this year with solar – the federal regulatory regime overseeing incentives for renewable energy here remains notably uneven, leaving investors and utilities with little long-term confidence. Fixing this issue, many argue, would allow both for this sector to blossom and for the federal government to substantially increase its emissions-reduction goals.

“A 17-percent reduction in emissions is actually far below what we should be making,” Henn says. “If anything, the [new U.N.] report underlines the need for more immediate and ambitious action.”

An international coalition has agreed to begin working towards domestic regulation aimed at reducing the use of HFCs, compounds commonly used as refrigerants but referred to as “super greenhouse gases” for their particularly negative impact on global warming.

Environmental groups are lauding the decision, one of a suite of agreements struck Monday at a summit in Oslo by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants (CCAC), which includes 34 developed and developing countries and 38 organisations.“This is a critical step in building confidence ahead of the big climate treaty negotiations in 2015." -- Durwood Zaelke of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development

The CCAC was created by former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton in early 2012 and today has expanded to include multilateral institutions such as the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation.

“We will continue to promote climate-friendly alternatives and make efforts to reduce emissions of HFCs,” the CCAC communiqué, released Monday, pledges.

“CCAC Partner countries will adopt domestic approaches to encourage climate-friendly HFC alternative technologies and work toward a phasedown in the production and consumption of HFCs under the Montreal Protocol. We will work with international standards organisations to revise their standards to include climate-friendly HFC alternatives.”

Indeed, analysts suggest the agreement could be particularly meaningful because the country representatives agreed to work towards the reduction under the framework of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. That 1987 agreement, one of the most ratified of all U.N. treaties, is widely seen as one of the most successful of global environment accords.

“Agreeing to phase down HFCs under the Montreal Protocol is the single biggest, fastest and most effective action we can take against climate change in the next several years,” Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, a Washington-based think tank, said Monday.

“Phasing down HFCs can avoid the equivalent of up to 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050, and up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.”

Zaelke says the Montreal Protocol is the single biggest climate mitigation tool available to the world over the next few years, as a new international climate treaty remains under debate.

“The Montreal Protocol helped the world reduce the use of hundreds of similar chemicals over the past 25 years, and it knows how to do its job,” he told IPS from the sidelines of the CCAC discussions in Oslo.

“This is also a critical step in building confidence ahead of the big climate treaty negotiations in 2015. If they don’t build some interim momentum and success, there’s no way those talks will be successful.”

Gigatonne gap

The CCAC focuses on four pollutants with short atmospheric lives – HFCs, methane, so-called black carbon and what’s known as tropospheric ozone, a main constituent of smog. The group’s founding aim was to try to reduce some of these short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) ahead of when next international climate treaty is to come into being, in 2020.

“The idea here is the recognition that between now and 2020 there’s going to be an eight-to-10-gigatonne gap between the amount of emissions reductions pledged by countries and what scientists say is necessary to keep the world’s temperature rise below two degrees Celsius,” Mark Roberts, an international policy advisor with the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a watchdog group, told IPS from Oslo.

“So addressing these shorter-lived substances could offer more time for the rest of the world to work on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In particular, as analysts have started talking about the best course of action between now and 2020 to get rid of that ‘gigatonne gap’, HFCs have risen to top of pile.”

Representatives will now be tasked with going home and figuring out regulatory or legislative fixes to various SLCP issues, including their level of HFC use. No targets have been set under the new agreement, but the overarching plan currently is to reduce HFC use by 80 percent, allowing the remainder to be used for military and certain other purposes.

While the CCAC has no specific oversight mechanisms, analysts expect countries to openly trumpet any new regulatory approaches, starting at the next meeting of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in November in Warsaw.

Also on Monday the World Bank unveiled new plans to incorporate analysis of countries’ SLCP use into its development activities. A new report found that the Washington-based institution spent some 18 billion dollars on SLCP-related funding over the past half-decade, while the bank will announce a specific goal on the issue by next year.

International drumbeat

The CCAC agreement is the latest in a strengthening international response to phase out HFCs, the use of which has increased significantly in recent years. And with HFCs a key component in air conditioning, their use is expected to see a massive boost on the back of rising middle classes in emerging economies.

According to the CCAC, global HFC use increased by around 8 percent between 2004 and 2008. But without international action, these emissions are projected to “accelerate rapidly” – by some 20 times in coming decades, according to the U.S. government.

HFCs were initially introduced during the 1990s to replace other compounds, known as CFCs and HCFCs, known to be particularly damaging to the ozone layer. While the Montreal Protocol was able to massively reduce the use of these other compounds, scientists in recent years began to realise that HFCs, though not damaging to the ozone layer, were extremely potent greenhouse gases.

Some forms are thousands of times more detrimental than carbon dioxide.

“Current predictions are that if nothing is done on HFCs, by 2050 they would be up to around 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions – basically offsetting all commitments that countries have made to reduce carbon dioxide,” EIA’s Roberts says. “On the other hand, if we can cut off this use now, we can save 100 gigatonnes by 2050.”

More than 110 countries have now offered some form of support for HFC reductions, perhaps most notably the bilateral agreement struck in June between the United States and China, two of the largest HFC producers and users. In addition, recent statements by both the Group of 8 (G8) rich nations and the Group of 20 (G20), as well as the Arctic Council, have likewise backed HFC draw-downs.

At least two proposals, including one authored by the United States, Canada and Mexico, are now pending to officially amend the Montreal Protocol to cover a reduction in HFC use and production. Those motions are slated to be formally discussed by members in October.

Washington and Beijing are stepping up research into new “carbon capture” technologies at coal-fired power plants. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 11 2013 (IPS)

The United States and China have agreed on a suite of potentially far-reaching initiatives aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the world’s two largest economies and largest polluters.

Environmental groups are applauding initial reports of the agreements, arrived at during high-level talks here on Wednesday and Thursday. Further, there is also a sense that the discussions indicated a warming of relations between the two powers that could constitute the basis for an important new cooperative relationship at international negotiations on climate change."Bilateral efforts between these two countries are essential – and this collaboration can inject additional vigour in tackling climate change around the world." -- Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute

“I thought it was one of the best sessions for climate change I’ve ever sat in,” a senior official in President Barack Obama’s administration, speaking on background, told reporters Thursday. “Not only were they high-level officials on both sides, but I thought that there was candid discussion, interesting discussion, and most importantly, proposals for cooperation moving forward.”

As unveiled Wednesday and further refined Thursday, the two countries have agreed to jointly focus on five broad areas. These include cutting down on emissions from heavy transport, strengthening energy efficiency, and improving the collection of greenhouse gas-related data.

Washington and Beijing will also step up research into new “carbon capture” technologies at coal-fired power plants, and collaborate on building new “smart” electrical grids that are both more efficient and can more easily incorporate renewable energy sources and distributed generation.

The talks also advanced modalities behind a landmark agreement struck between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in June to reduce the amount of HFCs, “super-greenhouse gases” used in refrigeration and air conditioning, the two countries use and produce.

“They’re clearly addressing some of the largest sectors in terms of greenhouse gas emissions – buildings, transportation and power, which together constitute the majority of emissions for both countries,” Alden Meyer, director of the Washington office of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“For the moment, however, it’s hard to gauge the actual impact on emissions without knowing more of the details. The most fundamental question is whether these initiatives will merely help the two countries meet already-stated emissions-reductions goals between now and 2020. That would still be good, of course, but it wouldn’t be adding additional ambition to the global effort.”

Current U.S. policy revolves around a 17 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2020. For China, the central goal is to cut its economy’s “carbon intensity” by 40 to 45 percent, also by the end of the decade.

Yet Meyer notes that “everyone agrees” that both countries need to do far more if there is to be any chance of keeping the global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the current international goal that climate scientists warn constitutes a dangerous cut-off point.

The talks are also being seen as a key success on the part of the new U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, long known for his climate advocacy. Kerry was integral in setting up a new U.S.-China working group on climate, and reports suggest the secretary of state has been actively engaging in this way in nearly every country he visits.

“This is no longer a side issue – Kerry has made climate into a centrepiece of political discussions, elevating it to the top tier of the geopolitical agenda, up there with security and economic issues,” Meyer notes. “That’s also being helped by the recent push by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the International Energy Agency to warn that this is a major threat to development and the world economy alike.”

Patching the disconnect

Climate change was not the only issue under discussion during the two-day U.S.-China summit, known as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED). But the talks did showcase the initial results of the bilateral working group on climate, set up in April, the final report of which can be found here.

“One of the great features this year is the special sessions on climate change and energy security, so we envision smaller sessions with a very focused agenda,” an Obama administration official told reporters in a briefing Monday.

“We want to demonstrate to the world that the two largest economies in the world can cooperate in this century to help tackle these environmental challenges … We’re hoping that at the end, we can cite some concrete examples of our cooperation through reduced emissions.”

Nor are the five initiatives outlined this week planned to be the end of the new U.S.-China cooperation. The working group on climate is reportedly working unusually intensively, a schedule that is expected to continue.

By October, the group is expected to agree on the implementation details for the first five initiatives. Thereafter, the Obama administration has suggested that climate issues will remain on the annual S&ED agenda, which will include annual review of implementation of previous initiatives and the assumption that new ones will be launched.

The results from this week’s discussions could now be used as a springboard to jolt ongoing international negotiations in the lead-up to a Paris summit, in 2015, where world leaders will be required to fashion a new global deal on climate change.

“There is renewed momentum between the U.S. and China on climate change. Bilateral efforts between these two countries are essential – and this collaboration can inject additional vigour in tackling climate change around the world,” Jennifer Morgan, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute, a Washington think tank, said in a statement.

“These actions can help build trust and enhance cooperation between these two major countries. The benefits of joint action are clear. Now, we need them to follow up with actions that will drive down global emissions and take advantage of economic opportunities in a low-carbon future.”

UCS’s Meyer notes that the disconnect between the United States and China on the way forward on climate action has been a key obstacle in the international talks over the past several years.

“To the extent that they’re now cooperating on the ground, hopefully that will spill over into a more useful partnership in the negotiations for a post-2020 deal,” he says.

“In Paris in 2015 we’ll need broad engagement and cooperation among leaders of major countries, which is what we didn’t have going into the Copenhagen summit [in 2009]. To have this new relationship at the leadership level more than two years out from the Paris talks is a good thing – this level of engagement among leaders will be essential.”

Extreme heat, flooding and water and food shortages will rock South Asia and Africa by 2030 and render large sections of cities inhabitable, if the world continues to burn huge amounts of coal, oil and gas, the World Bank is warning.

“Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts and the Case for Resilience“, a new report commissioned by the World Bank and released Wednesday, analysed the expected effects on South Asia and Africa if global temperatures increase by two and four degrees Celsius.

The report showed that a global temperature rise of two degrees Celsius will have a wide range of dangerous effects, including a loss of 40 to 80 percent of cropland in Africa and rising sea levels that will destroy significant parts of many coastal cities in South Asia.

“If the world warms by two degrees Celsius – warming which may be reached in 20 to 30 years – that will cause widespread food shortages, unprecedented heat waves, and more intense cyclones,” said World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.

He pointed out that such change could “greatly harm the lives and the hopes of individuals and families who have had little hand in raising the earth’s temperature”.

The burning of carbon-based fuels has increased the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere by 40 percent. CO2 and water vapour in the atmosphere are crucial in retaining some of the sun’s heat energy; without them, the earth’s atmosphere would be more like the moon’s: 100 degrees Celsius in the daytime and -150 degrees at night.

Adding 40 percent more CO2, however, has increased the amount of heat energy the Earth absorbs, with more than 93 percent of it warming the oceans.

Bleak findings

One of the shocking findings in the new study is the enormous impact a two-degree rise will have on the urban poor, said Rachel Kyte, the vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank.

Urbanisation is increasing rapidly, especially in the developing world, with many more people living in slums and informal settlements, Kyte told IPS from London.

The report painted a bleak picture for many cities.

As climate change disrupts rainfall patterns and generates more extreme weather in the coming decades, leading to poor crop yields, rural populations will flood cities. Escalating numbers of urban poor will suffer, with temperatures magnified by the “heat island effect” of the constructed urban environments.

Safe drinking water will also be harder to find, especially after floods, contributing to greater water-borne diseases such as cholera and diarrhoea.

Coastal regions like Bangladesh and India’s two largest coastal cities, Kolkata and Mumbai, will face extreme river floods, more intense tropical cyclones, rising sea levels and very high temperatures.

“Huge numbers of urban poor will be exposed in many coastal cities,” Kyte said.

Meanwhile, a sea level rise of 30 centimetres, possible by 2040, will result in massive flooding in cities and inundate low-lying cropland with saltwater, which is corrosive to crops. Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, a global rice producer, is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, and a 30-centimetre rise there could result in the loss of about 11 percent of crop production, the report found.

“We face a huge challenge over the next 20 years to…redesign our cities to protect them from climate change,” Kyte predicted, even as cities already face a huge infrastructure investment gap.

One trillion dollars a year needed to be invested every year by 2020 by some estimates, Kyte said, adding that “to build climate resilience into cities will take another 300 to 500 million dollars a year”.

A lack of water will be a problem in other regions. The projected loss of snowmelt from the Himalayas will reduce the flow of water into the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra river basins, which altogether threaten to leave hundreds of millions of people without enough water, food or access to reliable energy, the report said.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, by the decades of 2030 or 2040, drought mixed with destructive flooding will contribute to farmers’ losing 40 to 80 percent of cropland used for growing maize, millet and sorghum.

And while carbon emissions have already increased oceans’ acidity by 30 percent, by 2040, oceans will be too acidic for many coral reefs to survive. The death of coral reefs results in major loss of fish habitats as well as protection against storms.

“That will have significant consequences for ocean fish catches, which are already in decline today,” said Bill Hare of Climate Analytics and who was the lead author of the study.

Policy recommendations

The report is a science-based guide for the World Bank and governments for what these regions will face over the next 20 to 30 years, said Hare.

“Much of this can be avoided, and it will cost far less with urgent action to reduce carbon emissions,” Hare told IPS.

In a speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama called climate change the “global threat of our time” and promised the United States would do far more to reduce emissions. A detailed announcement is expected next week.

Last week, the United States and China agreed to reduce phase out HFCs, a greenhouse gas used in air conditioners. China has also created a series of carbon trading regions to cut emissions.

“These are small positive signs that need to pickup momentum,” Hare said.

The ozone layer if CFCs hadn't been banned. Credit: NASA

By Coralie Tripier
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 2 2012 (IPS)

The Montreal Protocol, a climate treaty that gathers all U.N. member countries behind the goal of protecting the ozone layer, may not be the “most successful international agreement” anymore, as former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan used to put it.

The treaty has achieved a great deal in the more than two decades it has been in force, with a 97-percent reduction in the consumption of ozone-depleting substances. However, it is now being widely criticised for worsening climate change by replacing those harmful chemicals with climate-threatening substitutes.

The total phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were widely used as refrigerants and had a high ozone depletion potential, has led to a climate protection bonus equivalent to 11 billion tonnes of CO2 reductions each year, according to the U.N. Environment Programme.

To put it in simpler terms, the Protocol had the annual environmental impact of one billion homes being completely off the electrical grid.

But this remarkable achievement is now being undermined by the chemicals that were used to replace CFCs: hydrofluorocarbons, known as HFCs, a group of “super” greenhouse gases. HFCs, which can be found in many products such as refrigerators and aerosols, are the fastest growing class of greenhouse gas and have an extremely high global warming potential, scientists say.

The situation is critical: without fast action to limit their growth, HFCs could annually contribute up to 20 percent as much to global warming as carbon dioxide by 2050, according to a recent press release by the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development

The U.S., Mexico, Canada and Micronesia have taken a firm stance, proposing an amendment to the Montreal Protocol during the last meeting of state parties in Bangkok last month, which addresses HFCs.

“Phasing down HFCs is essential to… limit the adverse environmental effects, including effects on the climate system, of actions taken to protect the ozone layer,” according to the text submitted at the end of July in Bangkok.

But the discussion was cut short as the proposed amendment, which would have helped attain an equivalent reduction of 100 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2050, was blocked by India, China and Brazil for the fourth year.

The three powers delayed any potential action by arguing that the phase-down of the harmful chemical should be addressed under the Kyoto Protocol, since it is a matter of global warming and not ozone depletion.

But most parties think that since the growth in HFCs is a direct consequence of the Montreal Protocol, it is also the treaty’s duty to find climate-safe alternatives.

“The legal mandate of Montreal is not limited only to phasing out ozone depleters. It includes making sure the replacement compounds are safe, including for the climate,” David Doniger, policy director for the U.S.-based National Resources Defence Council’s climate and clean air programme, told IPS.

“HFCs would not exist without the Montreal Protocol,” Clare Perry, senior campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency, told IPS.

“(The Montreal Protocol) is also the body most experienced in phasing out these types of chemicals and has all the necessary institutions and procedures to do it effectively,” Perry added.

But political manoeuvring appears to be overshadowing the initial purpose of the treaty. The dissenters might just be trying to narrow the scope of the Montreal Protocol in order to act in their own financial interests, according to Perry.

“There’s clearly a reluctance to take on binding commitments to deal with HFCs,” she told IPS.

India and China are “the precursors of HFCs, and their industries are determined to continue making massive and increasing profits from these super greenhouse gases,” she added.

The decision to block the progressive phase-down of HFCs is not in line with the recent promises made by 192 state parties, including the three blockers, during the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development that took place in Rio de Janeiro in June.

“We recognize that the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances is resulting in a rapid increase in the use and release of high global-warming potential hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) to the environment. We support a gradual phase-down in the consumption and production of hydrofluorocarbons,” the final document, which was also signed by India, China and Brazil, stated.

“Apparently their commitment to safeguard the climate from HFCs had less than a one-month half-life,” said NRDC’s Doniger.

The matter must be addressed urgently, since global warming and ozone damage are “intimately connected”, according to James G. Anderson, a scientist and lead author of a recent study published by Harvard University.

More global warming leads to more storms, and those storms will increase the risk of ozone loss from convectively injected water vapour, the study found.

But phasing down HFCs is far from impossible, as was made clear at the technical conference that took place on the weekend prior to the meeting of the Montreal Protocol state parties, and which presented the wide range of options available.

“There are many climate-friendly alternatives to HFCS in pretty much every sector… and this would be some of the most cost-effective climate mitigation available,” Perry told IPS.

Reducing consumption in HFCs would also allow world leaders to achieve the seventh Millennium Development Goal, set in 2000, which strives to “ensure environmental sustainability” by 2015 through the Montreal Protocol.
If the 25-year-old international climate treaty – the most widely ratified in U.N. history – wants to restore its reputation, action needs to be taken, Perry warned.

“(The Montreal Protocol) is widely considered to be the most successful multilateral environmental agreement, however we believe that the best is yet to come and it needs to ensure it deserves this accolade by swiftly adopting measures to phase-out out HFCs,” she told IPS.