After regulations and agreements like the Montreal Protocol, a United Nations-backed Scientific Assessment Panel has confirmed that nearly 99% of substances found to deplete the ozone layer have been phased out of use, resulting in the ozone layer beginning to repair itself.
An MIT study found that, with 95% confidence, the ozone layer is repairing itself, and according to the United Nations Environment Programme, progress in its repair is likely to continue as long as current policies remain in place.
“The ozone layer is expected to recover to 1980 values (before the appearance of the ozone hole) by around 2066 over the Antarctic, by 2045 over the Arctic, and by 2040 for the rest of the world,” read a 2023 article by the UNEP.
Junior Sofia Del Valle, who hopes to be an active conservation ecologist, said that most of the time when it comes to environmental news, she feels like crying and is occasionally scared she won’t see middle age. However, she said that news like the ozone layer repairing gives her hope for more positive change in the future.
Additionally, biology teacher Wendy Haas said that since the news about the ozone layer came out, she has loved sharing it with her students, hoping it inspires them to do the hard work no one else wants to do.
“[The repair] is motivating, it keeps me going and hopefully it keeps my students going because we have issues that we need to solve and I think without hope, it keeps people from doing the hard work and hope keeps that work easier to do,” Haas said.
While serious progress has been made in repairing the ozone layer, and it can be a source of hope, some environmentalists, like biology teacher Sam Gleeson, are quick to warn about false hope.
“It is such a fine line to walk of having hope while also being very aware of how absolutely catastrophic inaction is.” Gleeson said, “It’s like hanging 100 feet over a pit of spikes and all you have to do is a pull-up, climb up on top of it, and jump off. That’s not easy, but we can do it. The consequences of not doing it are that you fall 100 feet onto a pile of spikes and die.”
For Gleeson, the burden of environmentalism is the knowledge that there is always something else to solve, so he said that hope is only beneficial when it leads to action, but when it stops you from pulling yourself out of danger, it can be disastrous because the future isn’t as far away as we think.
“I think hope can be a privilege. For my whole education, we’ve been talking about climate change as this thing that’s in the future, and we are still talking about it like this ‘thing in the future’,” Gleeson said. “The idea that [climate change] is something far off is tough. The ozone layer is one discrete thing … but the problems with climate change are so broad and nuanced … and the overwhelming nature of that can be tough.”
