montreal

One of the first scientists to have pointed out in the mid-1970s the potential threat to the atmosphere of CFCs said last week that he had been both surprised and impressed by the success of the Montreal Protocol in restricting their emissions.

“It was frustrating for many years, but it really paid off with the protocol, which was a marvellous example of what the international community can do working together,” said Mario Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who with Sherwood Rowland was co-author of the research paper published in 1974 that first drew attention to the problem.

“We can see from the atmospheric measurements that it is already working,” Molina said in Montreal last week, where he was at a meeting to mark the tenth anniversary of the protocol. “It has imperfections, but the fact is that we have already found that the concentration of chlorine getting into the stratosphere has levelled off and is starting to decrease.”

Molina says that, in hindsight, it is always possible to find better ways of doing things. “But I am still amazed that the protocol worked; for many years I thought that it was hopeless — how were we going to get industry and the different governments in developing countries to agree to stop this? What I think helped was on the one hand the very clear scientific evidence and on the other the very clever diplomatic negotiations.”

In terms of the science, Molina says that it was a “very small community” that dealt with this issue. “One very important component is capacity building — we need to have more scientists in the developing world working on these issues.”