Everywhere you look, people are talking about climate change. For good reason too. With record-breaking bushfires currently sweeping over Australia and the Amazon, severe flooding in Bangladesh and an increasing frequency of extreme storms worldwide, it’s becoming ever more difficult to ignore. In our conversations about these tragedies, we return time and time again to the eternal question: What on earth should we do?

One popular solution is political. We must simply pressure our governments into action. Recent climate change protests have capitalized on this idea: our politicians have an obligation to their citizens to work together and to quickly and completely overhaul our energy system. And while getting politicians from every country on the planet to agree on a total ban on the release of dangerous gases into the atmosphere may seem difficult, it's not an unrealistic dream. In fact, we’ve done it before.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol is one shining example of a multinational environmental agreement that prevented international disaster. It was so effective that most of us haven’t even heard of it. An enormous hole in the ozone layer, which protects us from ultraviolet radiation, was identified by scientists in 1985. The hole was caused by the release of over a hundred Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS), most significantly chlorofluorocarbons (also known as CFCs), that were then commonly used as refrigerants and aerosol propellants as part of products like spray deodorants and hair sprays.

Because of this agreement, all identifiable ODS were successfully phased out. The ozone hole is now projected to fully recover by the middle of this century, and millions of people were saved from skin cancer. Pope Francis recently declared the Montreal Protocol a “model of international cooperation”.

There are many things we can learn from its success. Negotiations were driven by a growing sense of fear and urgency in the public, which puts governments under a lot of pressure. One environmentalist even compared the threat of increased solar radiation to “AIDS from the sky.” It’s easy to compare this to the public’s current stance on climate change. With strikes and protests worldwide in the past year, the pressure is mounting, drowning out the voices of denialists. To emulate Montreal, we need to keep the outrage going.

Montreal’s success was in part due to the development of the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol, which sought to assist lower-income countries in phasing out ODS. Countries have agreed to the development of a similar fund in the climate change context. The Green Climate Fund was set up in 2009, in order for higher-income countries to support lower-income countries in adaptation, loss and damage and rapid transition to renewable energy sources. If implemented correctly, this fund could be hugely effective in assisting the most vulnerable. But while the Fund requires at least 100 billion U.S. dollars per year by next year, to date it has only received pledges for under 10 billion.

The Montreal Protocol is obviously an imperfect analogy for fixing the climate crisis. Its negotiation process was remarkably rapid, and the protocol was ratified by every country on Earth only two years after the ozone hole’s discovery. Meanwhile, climate change negotiations have been painfully slow. The first report on climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the body under the United Nations tasked with providing the scientific basis for climate change negotiations, was published as early as 1990, and it has taken decades to produce any form of agreement. The 2016 Paris Agreement aims to keep the global increase in temperatures below 1.5 degrees by 2100, but is itself non-binding and only comes into force next year. It’s clear that fixing climate change is a much more nuanced issue than standardizing refrigerator coolants.

Our politicians have not been idle, but they haven’t been doing enough either. Climate change negotiations at the UN have taken place for the past 27 years. There have been 24 annual meetings of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change, and hundreds of meetings and documents in between. Nevertheless, throughout these negotiations, and amid all the promises for a cleaner future, 14 million kilotons of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere. There is also the added challenge of U.S. President Donald Trump announcing his intention to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, which will officially happen in November next year. Other major emitters, such as China and India, will have to take the lead, and the onus to provide the necessary financial backing will be placed on other high-income countries. This will reframe negotiations entirely and leave a massive political vacuum. In the words of Greta Thunberg, “The politics that’s needed to prevent the climate catastrophe — it doesn’t exist today.”

However, the Montreal Protocol proves that kind of politics is possible.

International agreements have the power to shape our planet on an unprecedented scale, and the Montreal Protocol shows us what is possible when the global community come together. There is room for hope, but only if we use the Montreal Protocol as a model and continue to ramp up the pressure, accelerate the pace of negotiation, and mandate heavy financial backing for lower-income countries.