HFCs: A growing threat to the climate

As governments grapple with the urgent task of drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to avert dangerous climate change, there is a group of little-known but very powerful greenhouse gases which, if left unchecked, could hinder all of our efforts to tackle the issue.

We use these chemicals in our everyday lives for refrigeration and air-conditioning: they cool our drinks, our cars and our buildings.

They are man-made fluorinated greenhouse gases - commonly known as F-gases.

The most commonly-known f-gases are the early, so-called first generation F-gases: the CFCs that destroyed the ozone layer and were banned by the Montreal Protocol. However, in the race to save the ozone layer, the use of their second generation cousins was accelerated: HCFCs, now also banned under the Montreal Protocol. Our focus in this report is on the third generation of f-gases: HFCs are powerful greenhouse gases developed by the chemical industry to solve the ozone crisis, but if used as substitutes for all the ozone-destroying chemicals they were designed to replace, could also end up in the atmosphere and have a devastating impact on the climate.

That's the bad news...the good news is that there are tried-and-tested environmentally safer technologies to meet today's needs. The time to implement these technologies is now, because developing countries are just now in the process of making technological choices for replacing HCFCs. The world is at a crossroads: we can go for HFCs and commit ourselves to catastrophic climate change, or we can go for environmentally-friendly alternatives and save the planet billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.