Nearly 200 countries adopted an amendment to the Montreal Protocol for the rapid phasedown of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), greenhouse gases with more than 1,000 times more warming potential, pound for pound, than carbon dioxide.

“The prospects for the future of our planet are bright,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a statement about the amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol. McCarthy led a U.S. delegation to Kigali, Rwanda, where the deal was struck early Saturday after negotiations that ran through the night, Chris Mooney reports for The Washington Post.

As Mooney reports, “[u]nder the “Kigali Amendment” approved early Saturday, the planned reduction of HFCs would have an impact similar to the removal of 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 35 years, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who also took part in the negotiations in Kigali, emphasized what an impact this single amendment will have toward meeting the target of the Paris Agreement, saying in a speech Friday that “it is not often you get a chance to have a .5-degree centigrade reduction by taking one single step together as countries — each doing different things perhaps at different times, but getting the job done.”