Which of the following statement/s is/are related to Montreal Protocol ?
(a) Reduction of the Production and Consumption of ozone depleting Chloro-Fluoro-Carbons (CFCs) in order to check depletion of

Question

Which of the following statement/s is/are related to Montreal Protocol ?
(a) Reduction of the Production and Consumption of ozone depleting Chloro-Fluoro-Carbons (CFCs) in order to check depletion of ozone layer.
(b) Work for the protection of the earth and its environment, maintenance of ecological balance and to enrich biodiversity.
(c) Study of pollution at pole.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), 'Only (a)'. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, adopted on 16 September 1987 and in force from 1 January 1989, is a control treaty with one object: to phase out the production and consumption of substances that destroy stratospheric ozone. Statement (a) is a near-exact statement of that object — reduction of the production and consumption of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons in order to check depletion of the ozone layer — and it is the operative language of the treaty, which sets out control schedules substance by substance, with baseline years and phase-out dates, for CFCs first and then for halons, carbon tetrachloride, methyl chloroform, methyl bromide and the transitional HCFCs. Statement (a) therefore stands. Statement (b) describes a general programme for the protection of the earth and its environment, ecological balance and biodiversity. That is a fair description of the broad environmental agenda expressed through the Stockholm Declaration of 1972 and, for biodiversity specifically, through the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992; it is not what the Montreal Protocol does. The Protocol is deliberately narrow — it names chemicals and fixes dates — and its success is generally attributed to precisely that narrowness. Statement (b) is therefore not related to it. Statement (c), the study of pollution at the pole, describes a research activity. The discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, reported in 1985 by Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey, is what gave the negotiations their urgency, and the Protocol's assessment panels review the science of ozone depletion including the polar hole; but the treaty itself does not establish or conduct polar pollution research, and a statement describing a study programme does not describe this instrument. Only statement (a) survives, so option (1) is correct.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Selects the vague, all-purpose environmental statement and rejects the one that names the Protocol's actual subject matter. Statement (b) would fit the Stockholm Declaration of 1972 or the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992 far better than it fits an instrument whose text consists of control schedules for named chemicals. A candidate lands here by assuming that the broadest-sounding statement must be the treaty's purpose, when in fact the Montreal Protocol is the standout example of an environmental agreement that worked because it refused to be broad.  (c) Right about statement (a) and wrong to add statement (c). The association is understandable — the Antarctic ozone hole reported in 1985 is what drove governments to the negotiating table two years later — but a cause of a treaty is not a provision of it. The Protocol regulates the manufacture, trade and consumption of ozone-depleting substances; polar atmospheric research is carried out by national scientific programmes under the Antarctic Treaty system and by bodies such as the World Meteorological Organization, not by this instrument.  (d) Requires all three statements to describe the Montreal Protocol, and two of them do not. An inclusive option like this one — offered eleven times in this booklet — is defensible only when every named item can be independently shown to belong, and it collapses the moment one item fails. Here two fail: the generic biodiversity and ecological-balance language of statement (b) belongs to other instruments, and the polar research of statement (c) is an activity the Protocol neither establishes nor performs.

Concept: Stratospheric ozone, concentrated roughly 15 to 35 km above the surface, absorbs most of the Sun's ultraviolet-B radiation and is the reason terrestrial life is possible at all. Chlorofluorocarbons — stable, non-toxic, non-flammable compounds used as refrigerants, aerosol propellants, solvents and foam-blowing agents — are so unreactive that they survive to reach the stratosphere intact. There ultraviolet light breaks them apart and releases chlorine atoms, each of which catalyses the destruction of many ozone molecules before it is removed, which is why very small quantities of a gas can have a very large effect. The mechanism was proposed by Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland in 1974, and the observational proof came in 1985 with the report of a deep seasonal thinning of ozone over Antarctica. The international response is a two-tier structure that is worth learning as a model: the Vienna Convention of 1985 established the framework and the obligation to cooperate, and the Montreal Protocol of 1987 supplied the binding, dated, substance-by-substance control schedules. Framework convention first, protocol with hard commitments afterwards, is the same architecture later used for climate with the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol.

State PCS 2026 Q31 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q31 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer