Rajendra Shende that deplete the Ozone Layer.In that capacity he attended most of the negotiations and the international UN meetings on the Montreal Protocol from 1989. In 1992, he was selected to lead the OzonAction Programme of United National Environment Programme to enable 146 developing countries to comply with the Montreal Protocol. In year 2010, all the developing countries successfully phased out Chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) and other Ozone Depleting Substances, making Montreal Protocol as ‘one of the most successful international agreement so far’ as per former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. As Programme leader in UNEP, he set up the systems for
Montreal Protocol including most of the major CFC producers, signed the Vienna Convention, which established a framework for negotiating international regulations on ozone-depleting substances. After the discovery of the ozone hole by SAGE 2 it only took 18 months to reach a binding agreement in Montreal, Canada. But the CFC industry did not give up that easily. As late as 1986, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy (an association representing the CFC industry founded by DuPont) was still arguing that the science was too uncertain to justify any action. In 1987, DuPont testified before the US Congress that "We believe there is