The Copenhagen Conference is definitely going to be more meaningful with a thorough discussion of issues aside from carbon emissions future. Certainly, emissions is vital to the phenomenon of the depletion of the ozone layer as tackled succinctly under the Kyoto Protocol. There are also areas that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the UN Climate Change Secretariat can look into. Aside from state industrial complexes reducing collective emission levels, there is also mitigating the effect of natural emissions like volcanic sulfur compounds that deplete the ozone. This is apart from other substances emitted by volcanoes in the throes of an explosion.
Undeniably, this and other similar events cannot but be factored into the deterioration of the ozone since sulfur compounds become hazardous to the ozone. NASA scientists say that the sulfuric acid clouds formed therefrom, make the nitric acid and water stratospheric clouds possess more destructive power.
Science had never been far from warning about the effects of future volcanic eruptions. While it is easily obtainable knowledge, nothing was done after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in June 1991 for instance that at the very least estimate:
ejected 10 billion metric tons (10 cubic kilometers) of magma, 20 million tons of SO2, bringing vast quantities of minerals and metals to the surface environment. It injected large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere—more than any eruption since that of Krakatoa in 1883. Over the following months, the aerosols formed a global layer of sulfuric acidhaze. Global temperatures dropped by about 0.5 °C (0.9 °F), and ozone depletion temporarily increased substantially.
Too many free radical catalysts endanger the ozone by the operation of catalysis of chain reactions. Carbon emissions, although they consist one of the broadest threats to the ozone, are by far only among many of the ways to by which bigger and bigger holes are punched in the ozone layer.
Suffice it to say, there is no more need to encourage separate standing conferences for other ozone depleting materials. Only that, the UNFCCC can do the brotherhood of nations a favor by including these in the Agenda.
In the Philippines, outside of the pernicious effects to the ozone, the destructive effects of natural emissions have been pointed out and appropriate solutions were proposed. However, as the world now knows, very little was done to re-arrange the massively changed landscape in the immediate and even relatively distant surroundings of Mt. Pinatubo that were severely affected by the eruption in 1991. Some scientists even go as far as to claim that there is no danger to areas south of the volcano as the natural tendency of the magma, lahar and future surface run off water flows to the north instead.
If the government in Manila as well as the United Nations itself are becoming more proactive as a result of great losses and the many teetering on survival during the wake of Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy), Parma (Pepeng) and other typhoons, it should be possible for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the entire United Nations not to be remiss in factoring in the significant role of natural emissions to ozone depletion and re-arranging of entire landscapes into destructive habitats or highly unsuitable sites for agriculture, aquaculture or forestry, other similar activities.
The Copenhagen Conference will have its hands full this December 2009, but then there is still the 2010 Geo Hazard Mapping and Environment Summit as well as other important conventions that can take up some of the Agenda that cannot be taken up in Denmark.