THE PLANET GETS BACK ON TRACK
FUTURE OF THE PLANET TAKING ON SHADES OF BLUE • BY ISABELLE BURGUN
Are we capable of repairing the environmental mistakes we’ve made? A number of initiatives suggest that we humans can put some indicators back on the right track. The improvement in the state of the ozone layer is a perfect example. This layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs the sun’s rays and protects us from ultraviolet radiation had a hole in it in the 1980s two and a half times the size of Canada! The cause of the hole was chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemical compounds used for refrigeration, cleaning and aerosols. Since the adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987, and especially since the 2000s, the ozone layer has been on the
PHOTO Shutterstok/asharkyu
mend: its thickness is increasing by 1% to 3% every decade.
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