Interview with Sydney

In the 12 years history of your organization, how effective was your campaign to convince nations and big corporates that there’s a disaster looming?
The OzonAction was launched in 1991, in UNEP DTIE’s Paris office with just handful of staff. The objective of the programme was to assist the developing countries in enabling their compliance with the Montreal Protocol. The activities included the capacity building of the government and the industries and providing the financial and management assistance in developing the strategies and action plans.
The programme has been evolving as per the needs of the countries. It went through restructuring in 2001 after a decade of its operation. Since then it has grown into multi location world wide service provider supported by 50 strong and expert staff in UNEP’s 5 regional offices and one partner organisation i.e. SPREP ( South Pacific Regional Environmental Programme) . Through this new approach, UNEP has regionalized the delivery of capacity building services by placing its Regional Offices at the forefront of project implementation and closer to the countries. The majority of the CAP team is based in UNEP’s Regional Offices where they work closely with the countries on an ongoing basis. We call this as regional delivery , the ‘Compliance Assistance Programme’ (CAP).
Today, OzonAction is world leader in the activities of ‘human networking’. It networks 147 countries in regular dialogue. It leverages UNEP’s convening authority and its expertise in value addition through consultations and consensus. OzonAction hardware, software and service offerings are used to enable NOUs to create the reliable and sustainable compliance solutions. Through such means the governments, industries and other stake holders have seamless access to the information, training and other capacity building tools. The services are provided 24 hours and 7 days through the regional offices of Bangkok, Bahrain, Nairobi and Mexico City with core monitoring and clearinghouse activities in Paris. The partners in Western Samoa (SPREP) help in reaching out to the countries around the world date line to ensure that when we say 24 hours, in fact we mean going beyond that.
OzonAction solutions are not just innovative. In a way, to use private sector semblance, it is competitive as the services are more efficient, timely and they lead to cost savings, process efficiencies and closer relationships with NOUs. One example is the first B2B web portal that promotes use of the recycled halon through the internet. These relationships are the networking foundations and the heart and arteries of the Compliance Assistance Programme that OzonAction launched in year 2002 to meet the evolving compliance enabling needs of the developing countries.
The Programme works closely with the government focal points. Our OzonAction Programme assistance is focused on strengthening national capacity to meet compliance targets of the Montreal Protocol Technical and policy guidance through he meetings; guidelines, training, handbooks and almost day-to-day contact with the National Ozone Units have helped to achieve the effective progress. The transfer of the developed country experience and developing the collaborative programmes between developed country industry and developing country industry helped in convincing that not only the disaster is looming but the action to prevent it would in longer run benefit the economy of the country.