The ozone layer is recovering – there’s hope for the environment yet | Andrew Simms

A global treaty to eliminate harmful chemicals and protect the ozone layer has paid off. We need to take the same decisive action on fossil fuels

“Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse,” wrote the poet Sheenagh Pugh. “Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.” News that the ozone layer is showing signs of recovery – 27 years after a ban on the manmade chemicals that damaged it – is welcome evidence that decisive international action can avert self-imposed disaster. It is that rare flower, a positive environmental story.

It’s easy to forget the potentially catastrophic threat the world faced only recently. In the 1980s, scientists noted the ozone layer – which screens us from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet rays and without which we couldn’t survive – was thinning. The cause was tracked down to a group of chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, that were being increasingly used in everyday household and industrial appliances and goods, such as fridges and aerosols.

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