The Grace Period

Every environmental treaty faces the same objection, and it is a fair one. The countries being asked to stop are not the countries that caused the problem.

By 1987 the industrialised world had put nearly all of the chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. CFCs were in every fridge, every aerosol can, every air conditioner and every foam mattress in the rich world, and they had been for decades. Now the rich world had worked out what they were doing to the ozone layer and wanted a global ban, at exactly the moment when countries that had never owned a fridge were starting to buy them.

The Montreal Protocol solved that in one article, and it is the reason it is the only treaty in the history of the United Nations that every single country has ratified.

What Article 5 says

The Protocol was adopted at Montreal on 16 September 1987. Article 5 is headed Special situation of developing countries, and its first paragraph does something unusual for a treaty. It sets a number.

A developing country whose annual consumption of the controlled substances stayed below 0.3 kilograms per person, measured at entry into force or at any point up to 1 January 1999, was entitled to delay compliance with the control measures by ten years, in order to meet its basic domestic needs.

Read what that actually is. It is not an exemption and it is not a vague promise of flexibility. It is a threshold, in kilograms per head, that a country either sits under or does not, and if it sits under it, it gets a decade. Nobody has to argue about who counts as developing. The arithmetic decides.

And then somebody paid

A delay on its own only postpones the argument. The country still has to switch eventually, and the substitutes cost more, and the plants that make the old chemicals are already built and paid for.

So in 1990 the parties added the Multilateral Fund, financed by the industrialised countries, to meet the costs that developing countries incurred in complying. Not a loan. Not a credit scheme. A fund that pays for the conversion of a factory from one chemical to another, on the reasoning that the countries which had used the atmosphere as a dump for fifty years should pay for the cleanup they were asking of everyone else.

That combination, a hard threshold, a fixed delay and somebody else's money, is what made the treaty universal. Every state on earth is a party, along with the European Union, which is a status no other treaty has achieved.

Did it work

Yes, and it is worth saying so plainly, because it is the only environmental agreement about which that can be said without qualification.

Production of the controlled substances collapsed. The concentration of chlorine in the stratosphere peaked in the 1990s and has been falling since. The Antarctic ozone hole, which is the visible symptom, has stopped growing and has begun to close, slowly, on a timescale set by how long these molecules survive up there rather than by anything anyone can now do. The World Meteorological Organization's assessments have reported the layer healing and recent holes smaller than the ones before them.

The full recovery date is decades away because the chemistry is slow. But the direction reversed, and it reversed because of a treaty.

Then the fix needed fixing

Here is the part that complicates the triumph, and it is the most interesting thing about the whole arrangement.

CFCs were banned. Industry moved to HCFCs, which damage ozone less, and then to HFCs, which do not damage ozone at all. Problem solved, on the terms the Protocol was written in.

Except that HFCs turned out to be extremely powerful greenhouse gases. Not ozone depleting, which is what the treaty measured, but hundreds to thousands of times more warming than carbon dioxide per molecule. The world had successfully replaced one atmospheric problem with a different one, using a treaty that was structurally incapable of noticing, because it was written to count chlorine.

On 15 October 2016, in Kigali, more than 150 countries agreed to add HFCs to the Protocol anyway. The Kigali Amendment commits parties to cut production and consumption by more than 80 per cent over about thirty years, and it entered into force on 1 January 2019.

That is a treaty on ozone being used to regulate a class of chemicals that has nothing to do with ozone, because the machinery existed, everybody was already a member, and the alternative was starting again.

What India signed up to

India ratified Kigali and phases down in four steps: a cumulative cut of 10 per cent by 2032, 20 per cent by 2037, 30 per cent by 2042, and 80 per cent by 2047.

Those dates are much later than the ones the industrialised parties took, which is Article 5 logic applied to a new chemical thirty years on. The argument is the same argument as 1987. A country in which air conditioning is spreading fast, in a climate where air conditioning is becoming a health necessity rather than a comfort, is not in the same position as a country where every building already has it.

The schedule is long, and the criticism of it is obvious. The defence is that a schedule everybody signs is worth more than a schedule that is stricter and that half the world refuses.

The lesson people take and the one they should

Montreal is constantly held up as the model that climate negotiations should have copied, and the usual explanation is that ozone was an easier problem: fewer chemicals, fewer industries, a clear substitute available, and a visible hole in the sky that frightened people.

All of that is true. But the structural lesson is the one in Article 5, and it is not about chemistry.

The treaty worked because it did not ask everybody to do the same thing at the same time. It sorted countries by a measurable threshold rather than by argument, gave the later group a defined delay rather than a permanent excuse, and had the earlier group pay the later group's conversion costs. Then, when the replacement turned out to be its own problem, it reused all of that rather than negotiating a new treaty from nothing.

Fairness was built into the mechanism instead of being left to the preamble. That is the part worth copying, and it is the part that usually is not.

Sources

• Ozone Secretariat, United Nations Environment Programme, "Montreal Protocol, Article 5: special situation of developing countries" (the entitlement of a developing country whose annual consumption of Annex A controlled substances is below 0.3 kilograms per capita, at entry into force or at any time until 1 January 1999, to delay compliance with the control measures in Articles 2A to 2E by ten years in order to meet its basic domestic needs).
• Ozone Secretariat, United Nations Environment Programme, "The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer" (the adoption of the Protocol on 16 September 1987; its universal ratification by 197 parties comprising 196 states and the European Union, making the ozone treaties the first universally ratified treaties in United Nations history; and the Multilateral Fund providing financial and technical assistance to developing countries to meet their phase out obligations).
• United States Environmental Protection Agency, "Recent international developments under the Montreal Protocol" (the agreement at Kigali on 15 October 2016 by more than 150 countries to phase down production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons by more than 80 per cent over roughly thirty years, and entry into force on 1 January 2019).
• Wikipedia, "Montreal Protocol" (the sequence of substitution from chlorofluorocarbons to hydrochlorofluorocarbons to hydrofluorocarbons; the global warming potential of the replacement chemicals despite their lack of ozone depleting potential; the establishment of the Multilateral Fund in 1990; and the reported recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole).
• Earth Magazine, "Benchmarks: September 16, 1987, Montreal Protocol signed" (the negotiating history, the objection from developing countries that industrialised countries had emitted almost all of the chlorofluorocarbons to that point, and the ten year grace period with a per capita trigger that brought them into the agreement).
• Environmental and Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School, "Hydrofluorocarbons and the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol" (the structure of the HFC phase down, the differentiated schedules between groups of parties, and the legal mechanism by which an ozone treaty came to regulate greenhouse gases).