Climate change: global deal reached to limit use of hydrofluorocarbons

The 197 countries that are party to the Montreal Protocol reached a compromise agreement in Kigali, Rwanda on Saturday morning to phase down climate-impacting refrigerant gases.

The compromise was arrived at after seven years of negotiations. Under the compromise stitched up, developed countries will start to phase down the climate impacting family of refrigerant gases called HFCs by 2019. Most developing countries, including China, will subsequently follow with a freeze of HFCs consumption levels in 2024 and subsequently reduce the usage. Some countries, including India, bargained to get the peak consumption year pegged to 2028, gaining an four extra years.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said: "It's a monumental step forward". 

More than 100 developing countries, including China, the world’s top carbon dioxide emitter, will start taking action in 2024, sparking concern from some groups that the action would be implemented too slowly to make a difference. A small group of countries, including India, Pakistan and some Gulf states, also pushed for and secured a later start in 2028, saying their economies need more time to grow. That is three years earlier than India, the world’s third worst polluter, had first proposed.

The agreement signed in Rwanda began long ago. The agreement is an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, signed in 87 and came into force in 1989. As recalled by the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, the creator of the Protocol was the Italian Corrado Clini, who later became Minister of the Environment. It was decided to ban these products through more and less hazardous substitutes for ozone: the first HCFC gases, less harmful, and then the HFC gases, harmless to the ozone layer. 

Thus, thanks to Montréal and thanks to industry research to substitute chemicals, the ozone hole in twenty years there has been closed, and now this threat to life on the planet has become very modest.

It is estimated that the Kigali agreement has an effect equal to cut 70 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions from 2030 to 2050, namely that the whole world stopped for two years to emit carbon dioxide, which they disappeared 500 million cars .