PARIS (AFP) — The US and Europe are set to call for an accelerated timetable for banning ozone-depleting chemicals as they prepare to mark the 20th anniversary Sunday of a treaty to protect Earth's stratospheric shield.
They are expected to make the push at a meeting of the 186 signatory nations to the Montreal Protocol, a rare success story in global environmental treaties, which gets underway in Canada's second-largest city next Monday, European officials said.
"For the European Union, the schedule for eliminating HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons) must be pushed up by 10 years -- that will be the benchmark for deciding if the negotiations are successful," said French Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet ahead of the meeting.
"We have the agreement of the United States" for the amended timetable, she said.
The current calendar calls for developed countries to stop using anti-ozone compounds by 2030, and for developing nations to follow suit by 2040.
But the US and the EU, backed by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), want to see 10 years trimmed off that timetable after discovering that patching up the ozone layer will also help tackle global warming.
The Montreal Protocol, adopted in September 1987, is designed to heal the gaping hole in the blanket of oxygen molecules that protects animal and plant life from the Sun's dangerous ultraviolet rays.
The atmospheric wound, which last year was estimated to span a record 29.5 million square kilometers (10.81 million square miles) over and beyond the Antarctic, is believed to be caused by slowly degrading pollutants in the air.
Some 88,000 tons of ozone-depleting substances are still produced every year, 85 percent of them in the industrialized world. Experts estimate that an additional 10,000 to 15,000 tonnes are produced illegally.
The gases have a "greenhouse effect" in their own right and also, by damaging the ozone filter, contribute to warming up the Earth's surface.
An official in the UNEP's technical division, Sylvie Lemmet, said an accelerated ban on ozone-depleting compounds could amount to the equivalent of a cut in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 35 billion tonnes.
That is 15 times greater than the CO2 reductions targeted by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol -- the troubled global treaty for reducing greenhouse gases -- between 2008 and 2012.
If governments sped up a prohibition on hydrochlorofluorocarbons -- used in products ranging from hair spray to fire retardants to refrigerants -- "we can look forward to not only faster recovery of the ozone layer, but a further important contribution to the climate change challenge," UNEP head Achim Steiner said.
Although ozone layer damage is expected to persist for decades, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that, with no further damage and barring an unusual string of extremely cold winters, ozone depletion will stop and fully reverse itself, returning to normal sometime around 2065.
Since the Montreal Protocol was adopted on September 16, 1987, 95 percent of targets for CFCs elimination by 2010 have already been met.
Experts estimate that there would have been an additional 100 million cases of cancer around the world had the Protocol not been adopted.
The Montreal Protocol is one of the few genuinely successful treaties covering global environment problems. It has been hailed by former UN head Kofi Annan described the treaty as "perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date."
It deals with a small number of sources whose production can be stopped or substituted with relative ease.
That contrasts with the floundering effort to tackle climate change. That crisis is being driven by greenhouse gases, which come mainly from the burning of oil, gas and coal -- the mainstay of today's energy supply.
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