Acid Rain in Europe: Background Information
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The earliest signs of acid rain, such as changes in fresh water environments (depletion and/or extinction of plant and fish populations) were noticed first in England during the mid-eighteenth century, and again in some Scandinavian states during the 1920s.
Europe's most recent ecological and political action to combat acid rain problems began in 1966 when a Swedish scientist published a study suggesting a cause-effect relationship between fossil fuel emissions and the damaging levels of acid particulates in Sweden's freshwater environments. He additionally identified both foreign and local emissions sources as the primary causal agents, with neighboring European states as the primary source. The prevailing north-west wind patterns on the continent meant that Sweden and other northern states were the final stop for most of Europe's acid based emissions prior to their falling back to the ground.
The transboundary nature of the issue required regional cooperation, only recently receiving movement with the advent of the European common market.
The Stockholm Conference on the Environment (1972) presented a first opportunity for environmental issues to receive an international attention. During the conference the Swedish government requested a negotiated solution to the problem.
Initially, East-West politics hampered the negotiations. At a follow up conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki, 1975, Brezhnev's call for increased East-West cooperation on a range of subjects, including air pollution set the process in motion.
Within a three year time span, a series of agenda setting meetings, held under the auspices of the Economic Commission of Europe (ECE), set the foundation for the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Pollution.
The convention was signed November 13-14, 1979 and ratified March 15, 1983. It established guidelines for gathering and exchanging information, rather than requiring states to take specific actions to reduce emissions. An Executive Body was established to monitor implementation.
Following ratification, member states of the treaty began working out details for specific reductions goals. At the first Executive Body meeting, June, 1983, a proposal was made to revise the convention. Participants were asked to obligate themselves to a thirty percent reduction in sulphur emissions, based on 1980 levels, during the next decade.
Support for this alteration, although not universal, gained momentum, and within two years, the Protocol to the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution on the Reduction of Sulphur Emissions or their Transboundary Fluxes by at least 30 Per Cent was drawn up. It was signed in Helsinki, July 9, 1985, and ratified September 2, 1987.
The year 2009 marks the twentieth anniversay of the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution celebrates a twenty year anniversary.
© 2000-2009. Patricia A. Michaels