In a blow to the increasing legal precedent in favor of citizens suing their governments over the adverse impacts of climate change, a vote by Switzerland’s parliament has rejected the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)’s historic climate ruling in favor of a group of older Swiss women.

The women — KlimaSeniorinnen, a group of more than 2,000 women over age 64 — won a lawsuit in April claiming that their country’s inadequate response to the climate crisis, particularly heat waves, had put their health at risk.

“The declaration is a betrayal of us older women – and of all those who are suffering from the real consequences of global warming today and in the future,” said Rosmarie Wydler-Wälti, KlimaSeniorinnen co-president, as The Guardian reported.

The original ruling was hailed as a huge win since it means countries belonging to the Council of Europe — the continent’s foremost human rights organization — are now susceptible to legal challenges when they are slow to make the transition to more renewable economic systems.

Even so, on Wednesday members of the lower house of Swiss parliament voted 111 to 72 to disregard the verdict. They argued that Switzerland’s response to the climate crisis had been sufficient and accused the judges of “inadmissible and disproportionate judicial activism.”

“This is terrible from a rule-of-law perspective,” said Corina Heri, a University of Zürich legal researcher, as reported by The Guardian. “The term ‘slippery slope’ is overused, obviously, but it is a dangerous precedent to create.”

If the Swiss women feel their country is not adhering to the ruling, they can complain to a Council of Europe committee that meets four times annually to monitor ECHR ruling compliance, Reuters reported.

Raphael Mahaim, a lawyer for the KlimaSeniorinnen, told Reuters the group was considering filing a complaint.

It is also possible for Switzerland to be expelled or leave the Council of Europe of its own accord if it does not want to act in accordance with the council’s directives. In March of 2022, Russia was removed from the council following its invasion of Ukraine.

Legal experts said the more likely outcome would be for Switzerland to be pressured to accept the judgment.

Isabela Keuschnigg, a London School of Economics legal researcher, said Switzerland’s refusal to carry out the ruling could “set a concerning precedent, undermining the role of legal oversight in democratic governance,” reported Reuters.

Joana Setzer, a climate litigation expert with the London School of Economics, said compliance was encouraged by the monitoring system and countries leaving the council would be subjected to “significant political and social repercussions.”

The post Switzerland’s Parliament Votes to Disregard Historic Climate Ruling Victory for Senior Women appeared first on EcoWatch.

In addition to the devastating death toll and widespread destruction of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the ongoing conflict has brought extensive climate damage to the planet.

New research reveals that the first 24 months of the Ukraine war had a climate cost greater than the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 175 individual countries, adding to the global climate crisis.

“Russia’s war in Ukraine has caused extensive devastation, including the destruction or damage of homes, schools, hospitals, and other critical public facilities, leaving citizens without essential resources such as water, electricity, and healthcare. Beside causing damage to the natural environment of Ukraine, this war affects the global climate due to the release of significant amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere,” the authors wrote in the study. “In the early months of the war, the majority of the emissions were caused by the large scale destruction of civilian infrastructure requiring a large post-war reconstruction effort. Now, after two years of war, the largest share of emissions originate from a combination of warfare, landscape fires and the damage to energy infrastructure.”

The study, Climate Damage Caused by Russia’s War in Ukraine: 24 February 2022 – 23 February 2024 by Initiative on GHG accounting of war (IGGAW) — a coalition of climate experts estimating the impact of the war on Earth’s climate — found that, after two years of war, the planet’s GHG emissions have increased by 175 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

The GHG emissions include carbon dioxide, sulfur hexafluoride — the most potent GHG of all — and nitrous oxide, reported The Guardian. The total is equivalent to the annual emissions of 90 million gas-powered cars and more than that of countries like Venezuela and the Netherlands in 2022.

IGGAW is partially funded by the Swedish and German governments, along with the European Climate Foundation. It says the Russian Federation will be faced with a climate reparations bill of $32 billion for the first two years of the war.

“Russia is harming Ukraine but also our climate. This ‘conflict carbon’ is sizeable and will be felt globally. The Russian Federation should be made to pay for this, a debt it owes Ukraine and countries in the global south that will suffer most from climate damage,” said Lennard de Klerk, IGGAW lead author, as The Guardian reported.

The report is the first time reparations calculations have been made for climate impacts related to war.

The researchers found that one-third of emissions came from military activity — fuel used by Russian troops was the single biggest GHG source.

The concrete and steel that will be necessary to rebuild damaged and destroyed homes, schools, bridges, water plants and factories will contribute another third, depending on what proportion of carbon-intensive and more sustainable methods and materials are used in the reconstruction process.

The other third of GHG emissions came from fires, military strikes on energy infrastructure, the rerouting of commercial aircraft and the displacement of almost seven million Ukrainian and Russian people. The additional aviation fuel used to avoid the conflict generated a minimum of 24 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Fires associated with military actions burned 2.47 million acres of forest and fields, making up 13 percent of total carbon emissions.

Energy infrastructure was also targeted, creating huge GHG leaks.

The study found that the forced movement of millions of Ukrainians fleeing the conflict, millions of people displaced internally and Russians fleeing their country generated nearly 3.3 million tonnes of carbon.

“The new monetary estimate of climate damage highlights the important role of greenhouse gas emissions accounting for conflicts,” said Linsey Cottrell, Conflict and Environment Observatory environmental policy officer, as reported by The Guardian. “We critically need international agreement on how conflict and military emissions are measured and addressed.”

The post First Two Years of Russia’s War on Ukraine Increased Climate Pollution by 175 Million Tonnes, Report Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new study from a team of international scientists has uncovered that nitrous oxide emissions, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, have risen continuously over a 40-year period.

The report, published in Earth System Science Data, found that nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions increased by 40% from 1980 to 2020, reaching around 3 million metric tons per year. 

According to the report, nitrous oxide emissions had the fastest growth rate in 2020 and 2021 since 1980, when tracking became more reliable. In 2020 alone, nitrous oxide emissions reached around 10 million metric tons, with 8 million metric tons attributed to agriculture, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego reported.

The warming effects of one pound of nitrous oxide are about 265 times the warming effects from the same amount of carbon dioxide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported. While nitrous oxide emissions have been rising, the report noted that the amount of nitrous oxide emissions released from natural sources has been mostly steady, meaning the increase could be heavily attributed to human activities.

Even after 2020, nitrous oxide emissions remain unchecked, with a nearly 25% increase in 2022 compared to pre-industrial levels.

“Nitrous oxide emissions from human activities must decline in order to limit global temperature rise to 2°C as established by the Paris Agreement,” Hanqin Tian, lead author of the report and the Schiller Institute Professor of Global Sustainability at Boston College, said in a press release. “Reducing N2O emissions is the only solution since at this point no technologies exist that can remove N2O from the atmosphere.” 

The report found some progress toward curbing these emissions, although more actions are needed, the authors said. Nitrous oxide emissions in Europe have been declining by 31% since the 1930s. While China has been the No. 1 emitter of nitrous oxides since 2010, according to the report, the country has seen the rate of these emissions slow down since the mid-2010s. Following China and rounding out the top 10 emitters are India, U.S., Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Australia, Indonesia, Turkey and Canada.

In the U.S., agriculture is a major contributor of nitrous oxides, but emissions from industrial activities have declined. Globally, agriculture contributed to about 74% of all nitrous oxide emissions over the past 10 years, the report found.

“While there have been some successful nitrogen reduction initiatives in different regions, we found an acceleration in the rate of N2O accumulation in the atmosphere in this decade,” said Josep Canadell, executive director at the Global Carbon Project and a research scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. “The growth rates of atmospheric N2O in 2020 and 2021 were higher than any previous observed year and more than 30 percent higher than the average rate of increase in the previous decade.”  

Because nitrous oxide emissions have been reaching record highs in the past few years, the report authors have recommended frequent assessments as well as improvements to agricultural practices, such as limiting the use of nitrogen fertilizers to slow emissions. They also noted that there needs to be better recordings of the sources of these emissions as well as nitrous oxide sinks.

The post Nitrous Oxide Emissions Increased 40% From 1980 to 2020, Accelerating Climate Change, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Diamonds are diamonds wherever they come from, right? Depends on whether you’re asking a jeweler,…

The post Guest Opinion: The Environmental Impact of Lab-Grown Diamonds appeared first on Earth911.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

Earlier this month, Laurie Stanek shoveled hay to a group of young black-and-white Holstein cows, just a few among the roughly 200 cattle on her family dairy farm. Located in northern Michigan’s Antrim County, she has worked there for almost 50 years now. 

The farm day starts early. 

“We’re out here at 5 o’clock every morning to get started feeding the babies,” she said.

But there are some additional chores for farmers in Michigan, now that avian influenza, or bird flu, has made the jump to cattle. 

New state requirements include limiting the number of visitors and increasing disinfection practices like cleaning boots and vehicles. Michigan also has prohibited poultry or lactating cows from being shown at events like fairs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has required that lactating cows moving across state lines receive a negative test result on bird flu. 

“We are conscious that the threat is there, and we wouldn’t let just anybody come in,” Stanek said, referring to the state requirement to limit visitors. 

With outbreaks of bird flu in dairy cattle across the country, health officials are emphasizing biosecurity — that is, efforts to prevent the introduction and spread of disease. 

Researchers are still working to understand how climate change is affecting the spread of the bird flu. But, as Grist has previously reported, H5N1 has spread outside its typical seasons as migratory patterns have changed. And research has shown that generally, climate change could join a host of other factors in making the transmission of viruses between species more likely — something called “viral spillover.” 

“We are in a place where the threat of emerging pathogens is much greater than ever before. So therefore, the need for biosecurity is even more significant than it has ever been before,” said Suresh Kuchipudi, a professor and chair of the infectious diseases and microbiology department at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health. 

Some, like Kuchipudi, say scaling up biosecurity operations can help the agricultural sector become more resilient to climate change. But it’s just one part of the complicated process of responding to the spread of viruses like the bird flu.

This strain of avian influenza is called H5N1, and it’s highly pathogenic, meaning it’s deadly for poultry. First detected in the 1990s, it has surged over the last several years, spreading to birds and mammals across the world. 

The spread to cattle is new. 

“I’m a virologist by training, and my other virologist buddies and I all have to admit: None of us saw this coming,” said Kim Dodd, the director of the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Michigan State University. Animals like foxes can contract the flu when they eat an infected carcass. But cattle don’t eat meat. 

“We didn’t expect to find [highly pathogenic] avian influenza in dairy cattle, and to find that it amplifies so well, and that we have so much virus in the milk,” Dodd said. “And so that’s really a big part of trying to understand, you know, what do we do about that to be able to help control the outbreak.”

The first confirmed case in cattle was reported in Texas earlier this year, and 11 more states have confirmed cases of the bird flu in dairy herds. 

Michigan has reported the most cases in the country. As of Wednesday, the state had confirmed 25 instances of the flu in herds. It also has 2 of the 3 confirmed cases of the disease in people — the other was a dairy worker in Texas. 

In May, state officials declared the flu an “extraordinary emergency,” calling it a threat to animal health, human health, trade and the economy. 

Officials and researchers have said Michigan’s high case count is an example of robust testing in response to the outbreak. Overall, the response to the bird flu outbreak in cattle has been somewhat rocky. States have pushed back against federal efforts to address the virus, and public health experts have raised concerns about the lack of testing and warned that the true reach is likely greater that official counts.

Those involved in Michigan’s response have said part of its response is collaboration with farmers. “That takes two sides,” said Dodd. “It takes the people who are looking and the people who are testing, but it also requires that the people who own the animals are opening their doors and allowing testing to occur.”

H5N1 causes a reduction in cows’ milk production, among other symptoms. It can devastate the poultry industry; since it was detected in commercial flocks in the United States in 2022, it has led to the deaths of close to 100 million farmed birds. 

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have maintained that the danger to the public is relatively low. But dairy workers are now more at risk of exposure to the bird flu as they work with cows; the virus appears to be spreading largely through milk. 

“We want to make sure that we’re limiting the further spread of the virus, so that we’re continuing to protect human health, and we don’t have so much virus in the environment that could potentially mutate and affect humans in a different way,” said Tim Boring, the director of the state Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

One of the ways the state is doing that is by urging farms to follow biosecurity measures. These are pretty low tech — like wearing protective gear and disinfecting equipment. How effective they are comes down to compliance. 

“I’m sure they’re serious. I’m sure they’re not fooling around. It’s their livelihood, their investments,” said Jean-Pierre Vaillancourt, a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Montreal. But “if they’re not sharing data, and they’re not doing good surveillance to figure out who’s where and what and all that, we already have a big problem.”

Climate change coincides with the spread of certain diseases, as animals interact with one another in new settings. While biosecurity may play a role in prevention or response, it likely won’t stop the next pandemic, Vaillancourt said. He argues that we should actually be looking at disease from a regional perspective.  

“What can we do to minimize the spread between sites?” he said. “That requires data sharing.”

That’s where industry and institutions often fall short. Farms that have outbreaks can face stigma and lose money, and farm workers that test positive can deal with health and economic issues. Worker advocacy groups have also voiced concerns that testing isn’t reaching those on the front lines. 

Some public health experts say the surge of bird flu in cattle is an opportunity to hone that response and protect animal and human life in the process.  

“The fact is, [governments] need to learn how to get this right when the stakes are lower, because there are less forgiving bird flu viruses than this one,” said Amesh Adalja, a scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

The agricultural industry will have to be part of any response to infectious diseases as the climate changes. Humans often interact with animals in agricultural settings. Preventing and responding to viruses also requires establishing trust with farmers. 

“This is going to be part of how you think about building resilience, is that you kind of have this integrated approach,” Adalja said.

That approach is known as One Health, which many involved in public health have pointed to as a framework that acknowledges the connection between people, animals and the environment and seeks to address issues like disease in a holistic way. 

Wildlife surveillance systems and vaccine programs can help track and control viruses like the bird flu. 

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And the dairy industry can learn something from those working with pigs, Vaillancourt said. An effort called the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project has involved farmers and the industry in keeping track of disease in pigs.

The big picture, he said, is that everyone involved in livestock needs to think about stopping the spread of disease. Say a farmer needs to move some cows.

“How do we move them?” he said. “Which roads are we going to use to minimize contaminating a site on our way. How do we clean and disinfect the vehicles when we go from one site to another site?”

A few efforts have been pushed forward as the virus has spread. The federal government announced that it would spend $824 million in emergency funding on its response, and the USDA just launched a voluntary pilot program to test cow milk in bulk.

And agricultural officials in Michigan say more safety measures on farms could become a bigger part of the state’s approach to climate change.

“Improving biosecurity in new ways that we hadn’t previously considered, I think, will increasingly be a component of robust climate resiliency actions,” said Boring, the director of the state agriculture department. “So we’re seeing a little bit of that in real time here with our response to H5N1 here in the state.”

And back in Antrim County, Laurie Stanek said dealing with animal sickness is just part of running a farm; they’re paying attention to the new rules and doing what they’ve always done.

“A lot of it’s just good herdsmanship — just common sense,” she said. “You keep your animals healthy so they in turn give you a healthy product.”

That, she said, is what their livelihood depends on. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Michigan: Climate change, bird flu, and dairy cows — and why ‘none of us saw this coming’ on Jun 13, 2024.

A reservoir is many things: a source of drinking water, a playground for swimmers, a refuge for migrating birds. But if you ask solar-power enthusiasts, a reservoir is also not realizing its full potential. That open water could be covered with buoyant panels, a burgeoning technology known as floating photovoltaics, aka “floatovoltaics.” They could simultaneously gather energy from the sun and shade the water, reducing evaporation — an especially welcome bonus where droughts are getting worse. 

Now, scientists have crunched the numbers and found that if humans deployed floatovoltaics in a fraction of lakes and reservoirs around the world — covering just 10 percent of the surface area of each — the systems could collectively generate four times the amount of power the United Kingdom uses in a year. The effectiveness of so-called FPVs would vary from country to country, but their research found that some could theoretically supply all their electricity this way, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Papua New Guinea. 

“The countries around the world that we saw gain the most from these FPVs were these low-latitude, tropical countries that did not have a high energy demand in the first place,” said Iestyn Woolway, an Earth system scientist at Bangor University and lead author of a new paper describing the findings in the journal Nature Water. “It meant that if only a small percentage of their lakes — this 10 percent — was covered by FPVs, it could be enough to fuel the energy demand of the entire country.”

For developing countries, floatovoltaics could be especially powerful as a means of generating clean electricity. Instead of building out more planet-warming infrastructure running on fossil fuels, like gas-fired power plants, fledgling economies could run panels on land and water, in addition to other renewables like wind and hydropower. With solar power comes autonomy: Utilities don’t have to rely on shipments of fossil fuels, but can tap into the abundant power of the sun.

Floatovoltaic solar panels — which have been proliferating globally, from California to France to Taiwan — are the same ones found on a rooftop. “It’s the same electrical system, same panels, same inverters,” said Chris Bartle, director of sales and marketing at Ciel and Terre USA, which is deploying floatovoltaic systems. “We’re just providing a structure that floats to mount that electrical system.” The solar rafts are anchored either to the bottom of the water body or to the shore, or both, to keep them from wandering.

In many ways, solar panels and bodies of water can benefit one another. Photovoltaics get less efficient the hotter they get, so having them floating on a lake or reservoir helps cool them off. “Because of the cooling effect, we see increased efficiency of the systems,” said Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, who studies floatovoltaics but wasn’t involved in the new research. Returning the favor, the panels provide shading, reducing evaporation. If floatovoltaics are spread across a reservoir, that could mean more water would be available for drinking.

If a reservoir is equipped with a dam for hydroelectric generation, the floatovoltaics could hook into that existing transmission infrastructure. (Countries like Kenya, for instance, are building out more of this hydroelectric infrastructure already.) That could save local governments money because they wouldn’t need to string new transmission lines from the floatovoltaics to the nearest city. In the event of a drought, when water levels drop too low to generate hydropower, the panels could still operate as backup power. 

To do their new modeling, Woolway and his colleagues began with over a million lakes and reservoirs around the world big enough and deep enough for floatovoltaics. Then they whittled those down based on critical qualities. For one, the body of water couldn’t dry up, beaching the panels, or freeze over for more than six months a year, entombing the panels in ice and damaging them. The lake couldn’t be protected by law, either, like as a natural refuge. And the site had to be near a human population that could use the generated power. 

A remote lake, by contrast, would require long transmission lines to connect a faraway city to the floatovoltaics. This doesn’t necessarily rule out the technology for more remote communities of people living near an otherwise suitable lake. In fact, floatovoltaics could be particularly potent there as a way to provide clean energy. These cases just weren’t included in the scope of this modeling.

Regardless, all those characteristics considered, the team ended up with 68,000 feasible locations in 163 countries. They found that on average, countries could meet 16 percent of their energy demand with floatovoltaics, but some places could generate a lot more. In Bolivia, for instance, floatovoltaics could provide up to 87 percent of national electricity demand, and in Tonga, they could meet 92 percent. The potential is much lower in the United States, however, meeting just 4 percent of energy demand — even though the country has a plethora of large lakes and reservoirs, overall energy usage is extremely high. In less sunny climes, like northern Europe, the effectiveness of floatovoltaics drops, but Finland could still satisfy 17 percent of its electricity demand with floating panels. 

“The regions or the countries that we saw had the highest potential had these two critical variables, in that they were close to the equator, or were at high elevations, so they received high amounts of incoming solar radiation,” Woolway said. “And secondly, they had large water bodies.” 

Covering 10 percent of a 100-square-mile lake, for instance, would end up with a lot more solar panels than covering the same percentage of a 10-square-mile lake. “We considered 10 percent to be a reasonable surface area coverage without having a devastating impact on the ecology and the biodiversity,” Woolway said. “If you were to cover the surface 90 percent with solar panels, there would be no light going into the water itself.”

This is where the new science of floatovoltaics gets tricky, as there’s still little data on the potential environmental and social downsides of these floating systems. Scientists are investigating, for example, whether the floats might leach harmful chemicals or microplastics into the water. 

And keep in mind that these ecosystems are solar-powered, too: Light fuels the growth of aquatic vegetation, which feeds all kinds of other organisms. If a floatovoltaic system cuts off too much of that light, it might reduce the food supply, and hinder plants’ ability to produce oxygen. “You’re changing light penetration, and that’s the most fundamental physical variable for an aquatic ecosystem,” said Rafael Almeida, a freshwater ecosystem scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who studies floatovoltaics but wasn’t involved in the new study. “If you don’t have enough light, and you’re reducing oxygen concentrations in that system, and that may cascade through the food web, potentially impacting fish.” At the same time, early research suggests that the panels can counter the growth of harmful algal blooms that make water dangerous for people to drink.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what amount of coverage can still produce enough power to justify the monetary cost of deploying floatovoltaics, while not incurring ecological costs. Each body of water is its own unique universe of chemical and biological interactions, so the same coverage on two different lakes might have dramatically different effects. “Would 10 percent be enough to cascade into system-wide changes?” asks Almeida. “These are things that we really don’t know.”

Researchers also need more data on how effective the panels are at reducing evaporation, and therefore how much water a given system might actually save. “What we are yet to fully understand is that so many of the existing floating solar systems that have tried to collect data on this have been smaller,” Gadzanku said. “So it is more: How do potential evaporation savings scale as you build larger systems?” 

Humans rely on bodies of water in many ways other than for drinking. Subsistence fishers rely on them for food. And owners of lakefront properties might bristle if they think floating solar panels would cut their property values. 

Still, Almeida says, this new research identifies where floatovoltaics might work, and how much energy they might provide given local conditions. “I think that now what we need,” said Almeida, “is understanding — out of these suitable sites — which ones are really the low-hanging fruits.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Coming soon to a lake near you: Floating solar panels on Jun 13, 2024.

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The post Recycling Mystery: Rechargeable Tool Batteries appeared first on Earth911.

An international team of scientists say efforts to protect the ozone layer have been a “huge global success,” with damaging atmospheric gases declining more quickly than expected.

According to the new study, the total amount of chlorine — which depletes the ozone — in all hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) peaked in 2021, five years earlier than the most recent predictions.

“This has been a huge global success. We’re seeing that things are going in the right direction,” said Dr. Luke Western, lead author of the study and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry, as The Guardian reported.

The reduction in HCFCs is largely due to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which introduced controls on the usage and production of ozone-depleting substances. HCFCs were once common in the manufacturing of hundreds of products, from refrigerators and packaging to aerosol sprays and foams.

Lowering the amount of HCFCs — which are also greenhouse gases — should help lessen global heating, a press release from University of Bristol said.

Developed to replace chlorofluorocarbons — banned globally since 2010 — production and usage of HCFCs is still in the process of being phased out.

“The results are very encouraging. They underscore the great importance of establishing and sticking to international protocols,” Western said in the press release. “Without the Montreal Protocol, this success would not have been possible, so it’s a resounding endorsement of multilateral commitments to combat stratospheric ozone depletion, with additional benefits in tackling human-induced climate change.”

HCFC emissions fell less than one percent between 2021 and 2023, but are still moving in the right direction.

“Their production is currently being phased out globally, with a completion date slated for 2040. In turn these HCFCs are being replaced by non-ozone depleting hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and other compounds. By enforcing strict controls and promoting the adoption of ozone-friendly alternatives, the protocol has successfully curbed the release and levels of HCFCs into the atmosphere,” Western said.

Highly precise measurements of these substances are gathered at atmospheric observatories worldwide by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) and the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment.

“We use highly sensitive measurement techniques and thorough protocols to ensure the reliability of these observations,” said Dr. Martin Vollmer, co-author of the study and an atmospheric scientist with the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, in the press release.

The study, “A decrease in radiative forcing and equivalent effective chlorine from hydrochlorofluorocarbons,” was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“This study highlights the critical need to be vigilant and proactive in our environmental monitoring, ensuring other controlled ozone depleting and greenhouse gases follow a similar trend which will help to protect the planet for future generations,” said Dr. Isaac Vimont, study co-author and NOAA research scientist, in the press release.

The post Efforts to Protect Ozone Layer a ‘Huge Global Success,’ Scientists Say appeared first on EcoWatch.