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Professor Megan Lickley , Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute for Environment & Sustainability and the Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) Program, has been awarded $4 million from the UK-based Quadrature Climate Foundation (QFC) to advance global monitoring of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are regulated under the Montreal Protocol.
The Montreal Protocol, adopted in 1987, is a landmark international treaty designed to phase out substances that deplete the Earth’s ozone layer, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). It is widely regarded as one of the most successful international environmental agreements in history, with every nation in the world committing to its goals. More recently, the Kigali Amendment expanded its scope to include HFCs—potent greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.
A central challenge of the Kigali Amendment is verification. While countries self-report annual HFC production and consumption, “there isn’t a formal verification process for this,” explains Lickley. “One way of verifying HFC consumption is to study the emissions at the country level… but the problem is, we have a limited network of observations of HFCs in the atmosphere.” Her three-year initiative aims to close that gap.
Under Lickley’s leadership, the project will establish 5-10 new atmospheric flask sampling sites in under-monitored regions including South Asia, Africa, South America, and potentially the Persian Gulf, areas where consumption is rising but emissions data is extremely limited. “We predominantly measure them in the U.S. and Europe, and increasingly so in China and some other neighboring countries. But elsewhere we have very few measurements.”
Prof Lickley explains the goal as twofold: “to increase our measurements of HFCs in under-sampled regions… and then to use these measurements to evaluate emissions and verify whether or not emissions match what we would expect given countries’ reporting under the Montreal Protocol.”
Email Professor Lickley directly to get involved!