 The Center for Strategic and International Studies. We have a special treat for you today. The topic this afternoon is Chemical Safety and Security. And we have, is that on my end or yours? I'm going to give you my phone. Okay, we're going to fix the technical problem. How's that? That works. Okay, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and speak softly. So, let me just, oh you have another microphone. All right. So I apologize for that technical glitch. We are, let me, just two administrative notes before we begin. And one is, I was just reminded by this microphone thing, if you have a cell phone, turn it off please. Or turn the ringer off. It tends to interfere with our audio equipment. We are also webcasting this, live streaming, for those of you who are joining us on the internet. So, we don't do a whole lot of chemical security or chemical arms control related work here at CSIS. So, I'm always totally thrilled when a good friend or colleague says, hey, let's collaborate. And so, that is the case today. We are joined with Green Cross International, as well as the International Center for Chemical Safety and Security, which is located in Poland. So, we are jointly hosting the session today. I'm going to keep my remarks really limited to just introduction so we can get to these great panelists. So, following me here on introductory remarks is Ambassador Krzysztof Patry, who is president of the board of the ICCSS in Warsaw, Poland. He was also the chair of the OPCW third review conference in the Hague in April 2013. He has been involved in a whole range of CBRN-related activities for many decades, and he's the founder of the ICCS in Poland. And following Ambassador Patry, we will have Dr. Paul Walker, who is the International Director of Environmental Security and Sustainability for Green Cross International. And he leads the Washington D.C. office. For those of you who typically come to our panel sessions, he's also very heavily involved in nuclear security. But in this particular area, he has really done some landmark work. So, I'm going to turn this podium and microphone over to Ambassador Patry for his opening remarks. Sorry, you have to hold the microphone. Thank you very much. I'm very grateful and thank you, Sharon, for inviting us to this prestigious place. I'm very honored to be with you today and to be accompanied by Amstel Jenkins and by Paul Walker and also several friends from the State Department and the Department of Commerce. And I'm also very glad that our team today is also represented by Mr. Mirczaw Borowski, Mr. Mirczaw Borowski, who is head of Technical Inspection Office in Poland, and his colleagues. I'm career diplomat. Thank you for introduction. And I'm running the Center, which we invented as a new type of activity. And the recent summit, U.S. sector summit, one of us called us iPhone in the age of phone within international relations, because we succeeded in bringing partners from different angles, from different parts of the world to work on chemical security. I would explain this later in my presentation how we are doing this, that we have this name, like iPhone in age of phone, but I also would like to stress that the Center introduced innovative approaches to deal with chemical security worldwide, and we introduced several important projects and programs. In Ukraine, in Kenya, we would have Dr. Ali Gakveli, who would speak about this program today, also invented the summit for chemical security to be organized in April next year in Poland. Therefore, again, I'm very grateful to be here. I welcome all the participants. We hope very much for your questions and comments, because the process we are developing is not a process owned by us. We are not owners of this process. We are coordinating the process of building global chemical security, and this process is very inclusive. Therefore, we are very happy to join you today to this prestigious but also very competent audience to hear your views, your advice, and your guidance. Therefore, I hope for very lively discussion and for good exchanges. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Krzysztof. My name is Paul Walker. You'll see in the program there are three of us hosting and organizing this event today, so I'm really grateful to CSIS, and particularly to Sharon Scorsoni for joining forces with us on this important issue, and also, of course, to Ambassador Patore from the International Center for Chemical Safety and Security in Warsaw, Poland, where I was just six weeks ago, I think, or two months ago. Let me also, while I have the chance in doing the thank yous to thank our staff here, too, particularly Chris and Yukari from CSIS and Allison and Ali from Green Cross International and Sabrina, too, from Green Cross International. We're taking, as you can tell from the agenda today, a fairly macro approach on this, but we're going to get down into the weeds, I'm sure, in some of these issues, too, but we're looking at consumer safety and congressional legislation, and as you'll see in the next panel, the TSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act has passed the House. It's over in the Senate now, I believe, and has different names in both sides. This is usually the case when I used to work up in the Hill, but I'm sure a good compromise will be, or has been made or will be made. We're also looking at, you know, criminal use of toxic substances, and I think the best example of that these days, of course, is the use of chlorine in Syria that we've seen quite a bit in the last year or so. We're also looking at facility physical security. Chemicals, toxic chemicals, in particular, really come under some of the most high-risk, low-probability, potentially, but high-risk sites for terrorist attack, not only in the United States, but globally, so we'll be looking at that from the Department of Homeland Security. And then we're, of course, looking at, I think, in general global safety and security in chemicals, chemical agents. I would point out that, you know, we've almost removed every declared chemical weapon on the face of the earth now over the last 25 years. So we won't be talking too much, I believe, unless you have questions on chemical weapons and the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons, but 90% of the declared chemical stockpiles have now been destroyed. As some of you in the audience I think know, there's about 3,000 tons left in the United States, there's about 6,000 tons left in Russia, and there's about 1.5% or 2% of the Syrian stockpile still remaining to be destroyed as well. So I would urge everyone to sort of think globally, act locally, as they say, think about the sort of holistic issue of chemical safety and security. And with that, I would simply call up our first two panelists and we'll all take our seats at the front here and we'll start off on panel one, which is chemical safety, modernizing the toxic substances control act. So if I can shift from the podium over to the table here, let me just introduce our first two panelists. You all have bios, I hope you picked up bios on your walk-in here at the front desk, but we're really delighted today to have a representative of chemical industry from the American Chemical Council and also someone from the United States Senate. So immediately to my right, I'd like to welcome Mihal Ilana Friedhof. Mihal received her Bachelor of Science in Physical Chemistry from McGill University in 1991 and her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Rochester in 1995. I don't think we're going to get to this subject today, but her thesis title was Quantum Confinement Effects on Semiconductor Nanocrystals. Everyone who knows all about that, hold up their hand. And Mihal, as I think you know from the program, has been the Chief Science Advisor for Senator Edward Mocky. And I've known actually Ed Mocky for a long time. You can probably hear from my accent. We're both from, not far from the Boston area. I live in Cambridge and Ed's actually from Medford. Yeah, Medford, Mass. Let me introduce also Michael Walls. Michael Walls is Vice President of Regulatory and Technical Affairs of the American Chemistry Council. Mr. Walls has a role in policy development as he oversees the issue of regulatory process and agency experts whose work provides a foundation for ACC's advocacy efforts. I won't read the full bios. With that, I'd like to turn the program over to Michael and just warn the speakers. We have an hour for this panel, more or less, and I'm hoping that we'll have at least 15 minutes after their presentations for Q&A. So I'm going to have Michael speak first, then Mihal, and then we'll open it up for questions and answers. So Michael, the floor is yours. Great. Thank you, Paul. And good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be here. When Paul first contacted me about this session, I was a little concerned that this was an explicit attempt to link Tosca with terrorist attacks. He assured me that that was not the case. Of course, at ACC we have a history in working very proactively and positively in support of chemical weapons controls. We had a lot to do with the U.S. becoming a full party to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and we're very proud of that. What I'd like to take a few minutes to do today is talk about the fundamental chemical regulatory statute here in the United States, the Toxic Substances Control Act. It was first passed in 1976 and hasn't been substantially amended since then. Now we're on the verge of actually both houses of Congress completing some work and I think completing a historic revision of this act. The industry, environmental, some environmental NGOs and quite a few members of Congress believe that reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act is necessary in order to enhance public confidence in the chemical regulatory system here in the United States. Frankly, the way the statute is written, the way it's been implemented by EPA, has kind of left the United States behind in terms of global chemical regulatory standards. This is our opportunity to bring our internal standards up to par and become what I believe would be a model for the rest of the world. And so I'd like to just briefly cover some of those, some of the elements of it. So I had only four quick slides here. I'm not quite sure. Oh, sorry, Chris, should I go over there? Can I do that from here? Great. Just press the down button, I assume. Great. So, TOSCA reform is our top advocacy priority. ACC is the advocacy organization for U.S. chemical manufacturers. Our goal is to achieve responsible, credible public policy, and we believe that in this area, we're now finally able to do it. In June of 2015, we had a historic House vote, 398-1. I can't remember the last time a major environmental statute passed any House of Congress by such an overwhelming vote. So the House has finished their work, the TOSCA Modernization Act. And now we expect the Senate to finish its work in the very near future as the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has reported out of the committee S697, a bill that was introduced by Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico and David Vitter of Louisiana. It's the first bipartisan TOSCA reform legislation that really has hit the Congress in a big way. The legislation now I think has 52 cosponsors as of today. The bill was introduced in the early part of the year and then subject to extensive negotiations that Senator Vitter and Udall conducted to try and address some of the other elements that in the view of some stakeholders needed to be addressed in TOSCA reform and they did that successfully. It was reported out of the committee on a bipartisan 15-5 vote and it's now on the Senate calendar pending action. I think there's still a possibility that the Senate will take up the bill before the August recess. I think there are some questions about the Senate's ongoing work on the highway bill and a number of other issues affect that even if it doesn't come up on the Senate floor before the August recess, it's our hope that S697 will be on the Senate floor as early as possible in September. So both bills take very different approaches to TOSCA reform, but they share a number of common elements. One, they encourage, they not only encourage, but they direct EPA to focus its attention on priority chemicals, chemicals that really need additional review for their safety and possibly additional regulation. Both bills grant EPA new authority to mandate the generation of information. Under current law, EPA has to regulate or reach a consent agreement with parties. Under both bills, EPA will have the ability to measure the generation of information. Importantly, the decisions on the fundamental safety of a chemical substance under its conditions of use must under both bills be made only on the basis of health and environmental considerations. One of the significant problems that has been identified in TOSCA as it now stands is that cost and benefit considerations come into that equation right now. Under the new bills, cost and benefit will be separated out. Cost-benefit considerations will only apply when we decide what sort of risk management measures are necessary in order to appropriately control the risks. Both bills have a combination of EPA-initiated safety assessments on chemical substances, as well as manufacturer-initiated reviews. So in rough terms, manufacturers under both bills will be able to go to EPA and request that EPA conduct a safety evaluation. That request, however, is contingent on an agreement to pay 100% of the costs associated with that EPA review. And the concept here is let's try and help the agency increase the throughput, increase the number of chemicals that have been subject to these reviews including the interests of the manufacturers as well. Both bills also require upfront substantiation of confidential business information claims. Now, current law also requires that, but in fact, EPA doesn't enforce those requirements quite to the extent that they should be. And under both bills, EPA will do a better job of systematically reviewing certain CBI claims to ensure that there's a greater degree of transparency that people understand what chemicals are out there. And finally, both bills do place some limits on state regulatory authority. There are preemption provisions in current law. I think Mihael and I may argue about this, but both bills do strengthen, in my view, the preemption provisions of TASCA in order to ensure that there's a more robust, uniform national chemical regulatory system. I think what I'd like to do is just focus very briefly on some of the key changes in the Senate bill as it was reported out by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And these changes reflect the negotiation that Senators Udall and Vitter had with several other members of the Senate. One of the key distinguishing factors of the Senate bill is that once a substance is identified as a high priority and EPA has defined the scope of its safety assessment, that action will preempt a state from taking any regulatory action until the time EPA completes the safety assessment. So it's sort of like a pause on state regulatory activity during that period. And the intention is, the policy intention is to fully engage the states in the review process and ensure that the EPA review then reflects all the national interests that may be out there. The Senate bill also has a low priority category. The regulatory EPA can review certain substances in a screening process and say, we think based on the information we have, there's sufficient information to know that this substance poses a low priority. Now that's not exactly a finding of safety. It's a finding that relative to other substances it's a low priority. One of the changes made at the committee level is that that designation no longer preempts any state action. So a state at any time can act on those designations. Also important in current law, states can adopt regulations that are identical to EPA's regulations or they can go beyond it to ban or phase out those substances. Under the Senate bill, a state can adopt an identical regulation but can't go beyond the federal regulation. Both bills do a little bit with fees so that part of the additional work EPA is doing here will be supported by fees imposed on manufacturers and processors of chemical substances. The Senate does a more complete job of that and as reported by the committee would allow EPA to raise fees equal to 25% of their costs to defray 25% of their costs or up to 18 million, whichever is lower. As I mentioned earlier, industry will pay 100% of these additional priorities that manufacturers request will be covered. So currently EPA's budget in the TASC area is around $58 million a year. That 18 million is approximately 25% of 58 million. So that's where that 18 million number came from. The additional change made in the Senate bill is that there were no processes on the throughput. So as originally constructed, there were no minimum number of chemicals to go through the assessment process. Now the Senate bill says at least 10 high priorities and at least 10 low priorities have to be identified in the early years and over the course of the first five years that'll grow to 25 substances. There is an emphasis on persistent bioaccumulative and toxic substances in the Senate bill, although in a much different way than the House bill does and I think Mihal would probably comment on this, so I won't go into the detail here, but it does take one category of chemical substances, PVTs, and has EPA spending some additional time to think about their relative priority for review. So Paul and Mihal, I think I'll leave it there with the broad overview of where we are in the House and Senate and we'll look forward to your questions later. We'll turn it over to Dr. Friedhoff. Mihal? Thanks very much. It's great to be here. I appreciate the invitation, Paul. I think where everyone agrees is in the need to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act and one of the reasons for that can be illustrated by talking about what happened when they tried to ban asbestos in the late 80s and it tried to use its TOSCA authority to do that and at this point I think 54 other countries have banned asbestos, but EPA wasn't able to do that using its TOSCA authority because it was litigated against and the litigants won and that in turn rendered a lot of EPA's TOSCA authority somewhat useless because it was really, if you can't ban asbestos, and ban in 54 countries, then what can you do? And so I think where you find robust agreement among everybody is in the need to provide EPA with stronger authority with which to take action to regulate chemicals that pose a safety risk. Where I think there remains disagreement is probably primarily focused around state authority versus the federal program and I agree completely with what Mike said about how the House and Senate take two very different approaches to the same problem and address many of the issues in different ways. I think where Senator Markey's no vote, he was one of the five who voted no in committee, was motivated by, it was really that the right balance between the robustness and strength of the federal program and the preemption that states are expected to accept in both the House and the Senate bill. And I think what has happened since EPA has been unable to really take strong action to regulate the safety of chemicals is that many states have moved forward and written their own laws and written their own regulations and taken their own actions to do so. And so at this point, now that there's the potential for one of these bills or some negotiated compromise of these bills to become law, the question is what do you do with those state laws and what do you do with those state regulatory agencies that now have decades of experience in assessing chemical safety and taking action to address it? And both the House and Senate take different approaches to that. And I can, you know, generally speaking, I would say that the, you know, the big point of contention in preemption on the Senate and in the Senate bill remains the so-called pause preemption that occurs when EPA first starts to study a chemical safety. And at that point in the Senate bill, states are prevented from going forward to address the safety of that chemical themselves. One of the things that resulted from the compromise that Mike talked about is sort of an administrative process by which states could ask permission to move forward with their own regulation even during that period where EPA is just trying to figure out what to do. But it's, you know, I think states continue to have some concerns about how those, how that compromise will be implemented. And on the House side, I'd say there are several main concerns associated with the preemption problem. One is with the scope of preemption. And the way the House bill is drafted, if EPA regulates a chemical, say because it causes cancer and they're trying to address the exposure risks that might result in an increased risk of cancer, a state would still be preempted under the House bill from regulating that chemical because it also might pose an acute respiratory risk to people who are around its use. And so there's a big question about just how broad the scope of preemption should be. And then the other key difference between House and Senate preemption provisions is that the Senate, really fairly effectively, I think, ran for others in older state toxics laws so that states like Massachusetts, for example, which has an older toxics law can continue to use its authority under that law going forward, whereas the House bill doesn't do so in as effective a way. And so I think how those two provisions come together in conference will be of key importance to a lot of members. I think where my boss would also like to see some additional changes is just with the strength of the overall program. So Mike mentioned that the fees provisions in the Senate are more robust than the House, and I would tend to agree with that. But $18 million represents 25% of what EPA spends on TOSCA activities now, and that's when it's not regulating, when it's not writing regulations, it's not assessing chemical safety with an eye towards issuing regulations under TOSCA. So I think it's reasonable to expect those costs to go up, but the Senate bill is, you know, industry fees are capped at $18 million, and I think that's something that Senator Markey would like to see changed. Another thing that also is sort of an interplay between the state role and the federal role is in both existing TOSCA and the House bill and the Senate bill, states end up being preempted on the effective date of any federal chemical safety regulation. But the effective date of a regulation and the date on which industry has to comply with the effective date are not the same. And so you could be in a situation where there's a state with a functioning chemical safety regulation that's implemented in their state, and then in comes an EPA regulation that sets the compliance date for 10 years later, but under all these bills, the states are preempted in that period. And so there's sort of an interest in saying, okay, well if we're being asked to replace state regulation with a federal one, the federal one should really have to be implemented in a reasonable timeframe, which is similar to many other environmental statutes like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act where there are implementation dates that are written into the statute. And the last thing that Mike was right that I was gonna talk about are chemicals like persistent bioaccumulant and toxic chemicals, but not just those chemicals. Chemicals that because other scientific bodies and other countries, regulatory agencies and other state regulatory agencies have been studying, we kind of already know a lot about them. And we already know what kind of risks they pose. We already know that they're present in our bodies because we have the epidemiological data saying so. And so there's probably not a need for EPA to take the full seven years that is allotted in the Senate bill to assess and figure out what to do about those chemicals. And I think there's an interest in trying to compress the timelines for both PBTs and other chemicals that are sort of known and understood on a scientific level to people. I think that's all I had prepared, but I'd be also happy to answer any questions. I wanted to just offer a comment on Mihal's last few comments about persistent bioaccumulant and toxic substances, not in the way of a rebuttal, but to emphasize that what we've seen in both the House and the Senate bills here is very much a risk-based approach to EPA regulating chemicals. They're looking at hazard, inherent hazard. They're looking at exposure and exposure potential, and then making a decision if those risks need to be addressed. And when it comes to PBTs, the House took an approach that basically takes exposure out of the equation and says, well, EPA, you have to regulate any identified PBTs within a certain period of time without regard to whether they're actually exposures to that substance. And I submit that that doesn't lead to an appropriate allocation of EPA's resources, because maybe they're regulating something that doesn't need to be regulated. So I think on the question of giving PBTs some appropriate priority and preference, I think there is a considerable amount of agreement on that. It's how exactly EPA goes about regulating it, where I think some of the differences lie. Thank you both very much. I think I can see some of the audience nodding their head and all, and some of you look very, very confused, I think at this point, because this is a somewhat esoteric subject, but I would also emphasize it's extremely important as well. Let me ask a couple, pose a couple of questions to you, and then I think we can open it up to the audience. But the original TOSCA bill was 1976, I guess, so the latest was 1976. So my original thinking is, why has it taken us 40 years to get a new revised bill? I mean, is this all politics? Because it seems like this has become a fairly bipartisan issue, and the state versus federal issue is still there a bit, obviously. And we know that plays into every single issue we deal with up on Capitol Hill, not just chemical regulation. But why has it taken 40 years to get to the point we are today? We were very close to a new updated bill. Well, I think there's been a couple of factors at play. One is clearly politics. The late Senator Frank Lautenberg from New Jersey had, I think, had TOSCA reform legislation introduced in at least four consecutive Congresses. It might have been five. During that period of time, he was unable to attract a single Republican to co-sponsor his bills. And second, I think that it took a long time for the stakeholder community to start to come together to identify where some of the potential middle ground might lie. Chemical regulation has significant implications. One out of every eight U.S. patents, for example, is related to chemistry. We consistently return a trade surplus here in the United States. We make a significant contribution to the economy. We provide good, high-paying, well-paying jobs throughout the country. So we have a significant economic stake in chemical regulation. We've also seen some models out there, notably in Europe, that don't really provide a good model for changes to U.S. chemical regulation. So in Europe, they adopted something called REACH, the Registration Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals Program. It's a regulation, so it was immediately applicable throughout the entire EU, and it reflects very different social, cultural, and legal norms that apply in Europe compared to the United States. It's not a system that could be easily translated into regulation here in the United States. There are parts of TOSCA, finally, there are parts of TOSCA that are really important to chemical manufacturers in order to maintain our competitive edge. So I think there's general agreement that the new chemicals program, so sorry, let me back up one step. If you think about chemicals in commerce since the day TOSCA was passed, you have a set of chemicals that were sort of grandfathered into the system. They didn't undergo any systematic review, and basically what happened is Congress drew a line and said, okay, from this day forward, EPA, you do a systematic review of new chemicals coming onto the market, and then you get to the existing chemicals as you can. Well, turns out EPA has put most of their effort into new chemical review and not existing chemical review. So you have allegations that there's 84,000 substances in U.S. commerce that have never been effectively reviewed by Congress. Well, actually on the basis of periodic reports from the industry to EPA, the number is actually closer to about 8,000 substances produced in amounts greater than 25,000 pounds, there's probably a few thousand others below that amount, but that's just the reporting threshold EPA established. But the point of TOSCA reform right now is to really focus on how does EPA do that systematic review of those existing chemicals in commerce that really weren't subject to that systematic review, and that's what I think it just took a while for all the stakeholders to come together. I mean, it was 2008 when the American Chemistry Council finally took a, did take a position supporting TOSCA reform and we had outlined a number of principles that we wanted to see reflected in that legislation. And I'm happy to say that the legislation in both the House and the Senate generally reflect those principles that the industry set out as a benchmark for TOSCA reform. So sorry for the long answer. And I'll just add, Mike, feel free to disagree with me, but I also think the other thing that's changed in recent years is sort of consumer awareness and interest in what is in the products that they're buying. And whether it's reports of formaldehyde outgassing from building materials or imported crayons that have asbestos in them or entire billion-dollar businesses that are being launched on the premise that the chemicals that they use are not harmful. I think that there's an interest on the part of all stakeholders to kind of have some understanding about what is safe and what is not. And before consumers end up driving the regulation, you really would want the federal government to be driving it. And I think that's a great point, you all, because it has led, at least in some respects, to an increase in the amount of state-based regulation as well as marketplace regulation where retailers, in particular, are making what are effectively regulatory decisions to get out of products containing XYZ, for example. And so a robust national chemical regulatory system helps avoid that problem of having inconsistent state or marketplace decisions. The bill that was introduced in the House was, I think it was called the Schimpkes-Pollone bill or something close to that. So it was a bipartisan Schimpkes being the chair of the Energy and Energy and Commerce, a subcommittee of jurisdiction, yeah, and Frank Pollone from New York, I think, being the minority. New Jersey, great. And Upton, that's right, from the full committee. In the Senate, Miehl, the original bill I saw was a Boxer-Mocky bill, which was named after a couple of victims of asbestos, I think introduced in, I mean, the printout I have here is March 12th of this year. So how did the Boxer-Mocky bill become the, you know, the bill that Mike spoke of, which was what, the Vita U-Doll bill. Are they totally separate? They're totally separate and not separate at the same time. So in the Senate, it was actually the U-Doll Vita bill that was introduced first, and I'd say that before the committee compromised the negotiations occurred, that bill had many more controversial provisions associated with it, both on the state preemption side as well as on the federal program side. So Senator Boxer, who's the ranking Democrat on the full committee, and Senator Marky, who's the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee of jurisdiction, introduced basically a modified version of the U-Doll Vita bill. It's almost a red line when you look at it. It's sort of an edited version of their bill. And the purpose of introducing it was just to sort of highlight what changes, you know, those two members felt needed to be incorporated into the underlying text. So it was, I'd say the U-Doll Vita bill really came first. Yeah, as one who hasn't followed this, but who has worked on the Hill, I understand the competing jurisdictions and the very complicated history of almost every bill on the Hill. Let me ask you about opposition to the bill currently. I mean, we're apparently very close to passing it in the Senate, I assume, assuming the schedule now allows for it this summer, which may not, are there opponents to the bill at this point in either the House of the Senate or on the outside, a lobby groups that would be opposed? I'd say that most environmental and public health groups have not endorsed either bill and continue to have concerns with both. And I'd say that there are, you know, I don't know that the states have taken formal positions when we are the other, but I think there's widespread recognition that both bills do constrain current state authority and there's concerns about that as well. Do you want to add anything to that? I think that's a fair statement. I'd say there's no organized industry opposition to either bill. So I'd note that as a significant achievement. I'd also say on the positive side, there are environmental groups that support this legislation. There are states that support the legislation. So there have been appropriate concerns, I think, raised and addressed in one way or another, or not addressed, depending on your perspective. What percentage chance of success would you both place on it before this Congress recesses at the end of the year? Meaning in the next week? No, no, say in the next six months. To be enacted or to pass the Senate? Well, I believe that we are probably on the verge of getting something like 85 or 90 votes in the Senate. That's how powerful, I think, a piece of legislation has been written in the Senate. Ultimately, I think that that means that we can see the legislation enacted this year. I would hope that no later than October or November we'd be able to get something on the president's desk. As I went through that list of issues where there are similar concepts embodied in both bills, I really don't think that there's anything here that's not imminently reconcilable between the two versions. At some point, there's going to have to be some political decisions made, but I think on the whole we can. You could see a path forward now between the two versions that are out there. I could totally see Mike's prediction coming true. I would also just say that if you have two very different bills, one that is overwhelmingly passed by the House and the other that is overwhelmingly passed by the Senate, it really does come down to kind of a member-level decision about which bill is the one that you work off of, and sometimes that can take more time. I think on policy I would tend to agree that there's a pathway forward. With that, why don't I open it up for questions if people have questions? Any Senator House experts here or congressional experts in the audience at all? I have more questions too, but I'd like to give you a chance to weigh in if you'd like. No questions? One back here. Yes. And everyone, just please identify yourself. Andrew Bairds. I have a chemical engineer placement service, but anyway, I'm just kind of curious, what other hot existing chemicals are we talking about if maybe Mr. Wallace could tell us some more of these things that are considered really urgent to look at? Well, I think maybe a place to start would be with EPA's own work plan chemicals program. So in March of 2012, EPA published a list that's now about 90 chemicals and chemical compounds that EPA has reviewed, has basically screened and said we think there are some questions here about potential hazards or exposures that we don't know enough about and we'd like to take a look at those. Both bills, in fact, direct EPA to start with that list so that they can sort of hit the ground running with a priority list. So I'd say, you know, without trying to call out specifics, there's I think six metals on there, things like mercury and cadmium, for example. Asbestos is on the list. A group of flame retardants is on the list. So again, it's about 90 substances. And if the EPA started to, in fact, examine these chemicals, how long does it, does the schedule, does the timeline, or the clock go? It all depends on how much money there is. Right. At the hearing, you know, and based on the bill as it stood at the time, which is different than how it stands now, the EPA witness said in response to Senator Markey that it would take, I think, something like 100 years for EPA to finish studying the thousand chemicals that it has sort of said, or perhaps in most need of addressing. And, you know, I think with more money and with tighter deadlines and with advances in technology, that could be considerably sped up. But, you know, really, you need the money, you need the deadlines, and you need the technology for that to happen. And so, you know, I think Senator Markey is hoping that further improvements could be made in those areas. I just add that both the House and the Senate bills do push the agency to look to new technologies where they are emerging, and we are seeing some new technologies in computational toxicology that could very well enable EPA to at least screen chemicals for their relative priority much more quickly than they do today. Those tools haven't been yet proven to be applicable in actual chemical risk assessment yet. So the bills focus on the science, and as I mentioned, the Senate bill does a little more robust job on raising revenue for EPA to apply. Plus, the Senate bill does require a periodic review of that fee structure every three years and a mechanism to try and help EPA keep up. If we talk about money, how much does EPA really need? And are they getting that now? Probably not, I assume. No, I think it costs about $2.5 million per chemical using today's technologies. I think there's an expectation that those costs will come down both as EPA gets more experienced in doing these sorts of assessments and regulations, but also I think everyone expects that the first bunch of chemicals that EPA works on may be among the more complicated ones. So I think everyone does see a pathway for those costs to come down. That said, the bill, as reported at a committee, provides $18 million for EPA from the industry cost share component. And if you take that and combine it with a sort of more and more constrained appropriations environment for everything, it's hard to see how it would be possible for EPA to screen as many as are in commerce or as many as are the most concerning in less than decades, multiple decades. Several comments on that. I think that's why the resources are clearly a factor here for EPA. But it's important to note that it's not $2.5 million per chemical per year going through this process. It's $2.5 million on average going through the entire process. EPA I think says somewhere around 60% of their costs are actually in the regulatory phase. They're not in the assessment phase. Remember too that these are assessments that are going to be conducted on the basis of information largely provided by manufacturers. And so it's hard for me to see if much of the information, if the required information has been generated, that EPA doesn't get better at this as it goes along and can sort of expedite these reviews. I think a significant question now still applies though and that's the degree to which EPA is going to follow the science. Both bills kind of say, okay, you have to apply the best available science using a way to the evidence approach. What exactly does that mean? Both bills leave that to EPA's definition. And so I think on the industry side we've seen circumstances in the past where EPA's contention that it's applying best available science doesn't quite add up for us. So we're going to be watching that area in particular very carefully to ensure that we see a reform task of being implemented in a way that does get EPA to sound decisions on more chemicals faster than has certainly been our experience under current law. So the Chemical Weapons Convention defines or promotes the peaceful uses of chemistry, those are the words they use, and I would assume that if a chemical really has very negative toxic impacts it's not a peaceful use, right, or not a healthy use of the chemical. I'm not sure I fully agree with that because there's a difference between a chemical that is used as a weapon and that poses acute risks on exposure and a chemical that increases the risk of disease over many, many years worth of low level exposure. And I don't think there's necessarily equivalence there. That's a good point. It is a good point. And so I, of course, disagree, Paul, that that would be the case. Both bills pretty much focus EPA's attention on the intended conditions of use. And I think I can say categorically that there's no manufacturer in the United States that intends their product to be used as a weapon. Yeah, of course. I mean, when we see chlorine used today which is used all over the place for peaceful uses, obviously, and water treatment and the like, but it's been used for non-peaceful uses in certain parts of the world these days as well. Are there other questions at all? Yes. And wait for the microphone. And then identify yourself. Samira, Daniels, Ramsey, decisions. Speak up, speak up. Okay. My question is related to what the potential of uses of fluoride, which has been controversial, that doesn't fall under this particular inquiry into harmful chemicals and so forth, whether you know anything about that. If you're talking about the fluoridation of public drinking water supplies, there's other legislation that governs EPA's jurisdiction in that area, not the Toxic Substances Control Act. Although notionally, EPA could be looking at some of those uses here, but I don't believe that substance has shown up as a priority at this point. Has EPA testified in favor of either bill, or have they taken a public stand on the bill so far? No. They normally, I mean, EPA did testify in both the House and Senate on the legislation at the time and kind of confined their testimony to the areas, to their own TOSCA principles and answered questions that senators or members posed to them about the bills. Typically, the administration weighs in on bills right before they go to the floor. In the House sign, since the bill passed on the suspension calendar, there wasn't really a formal statement. So we could expect if they go to conference and produce a final bill, the administration would weigh in at that point or before conference? See the administration weighing in on the Senate bill, because it won't go, there is no suspension calendar on the Senate sign. So I could imagine a statement of administration policy that might lay out what their views are on the bill. And I imagine there could be additional opportunities for the administration to weigh in as well during conference. Great. Thank you. Other questions at all? Yes. We still have a few minutes. Andrew Baird again. I'm just curious about the, you mentioned the science and epidemiology. What is the protocol for EPA to determine what studies they're going to use and who are doing these studies? I think EPA, I think the bill basically tells EPA to look at all available information and additionally gives EPA the authority to request information from manufacturers. So they can look at whatever they want really. But there's words particularly in the Senate bill that direct them to use peer-reviewed work and other sort of accepted scientific practices. Right. I think an EPA is also directed to develop guidance that goes to the quality and reliability of the information that's produced. There is some existing guidance already. It has a number of risk assessment frameworks that they now apply to different substances. So we would expect that that material would be brought forward, maybe updated if required. You said earlier Mike that you have to use the best science, the bills say you have to use the best science. But I would argue that that's still pretty amorphous as I think you're probably pointing out. It depends on the manufacturer, it depends on the laboratory, it depends on how long and how comprehensive the testing really is. Whether it's asbestos or formaldehyde or whether it's a whole variety of chemicals, right? Oh, that's exactly right. So it still could be litigated even if it found one way or the other. Absolutely. All of this is probably subject to further elimination. We shouldn't be under any illusions here. We're talking about the first revision to a major environmental statute in 40 years, that's going to bring with it under our system some degree of litigation. Now hopefully we'll also, the litigation won't be about the fundamental science or the application of the fundamental science more properly. But it'll be more about sort of the process and procedures. Things that still need to be worked out. But we have fundamental disagreements over science today, right? Tosca reform is not going to make that problem go away. But hopefully what the bills do is require EPA to approach this with a great degree of transparency so that there's an awareness in the industry, in the stakeholder community, and at EPA about what's the level of information that would be required to make a decision on the safety of a chemical substance under its intended conditions of use. And I would just add, and I'm sure this is another place where Mike and I just agree, in that, you know, I agree with Paul that litigation really does tend to follow scientific decision making around these days. And, you know, looking even at the scientific uncertainty that some have suggested still exists in the climate science space. You can see how there are some people who are, you know, some stakeholders that may not want to see particular regulations go into effect that will make the argument that there's scientific uncertainty even when there really is consensus by any reasonable assessment of what consensus means. I agree with Mike, though, that litigation will, you know, will follow the enactment of this law under any foreseeable circumstance. But you're both, I have a sense you're both really fully supportive of passing a good bill which somewhat resembles what we have today in both the House and the Senate. I don't think Senator Markey, I mean, Senator Markey didn't support the bill, the Senate bill coming out of committee, and is not in a position to support that bill right now. I think he would wish to see additional changes made to it before he could support that bill. For my part, I hope Senator Markey will be among those voting for this bill when it gets to the Senate floor. I think both houses have, you know, it's not surprising that we see different results in both houses, right? And I think we've got enough of a foundation here that hopefully even those that have expressed some skepticism about one approach or another can be brought on board and say, look, at this point in time, we can get so far in Tosca reform, it's important that we actually make it happen and we need to move forward. I think you both really presented an excellent review and I think very understandable for all of us too who aren't down into the weeds on legislation like this, but I would just emphasize to me this is extremely important that we improve, you know, better understanding and science-based analysis of all chemicals. And if they happen to be quite toxic, of course, that should be at the top priority. So hopefully we can move forward after 40 years and have some sort of a bipartisan approach. It seems like we're getting there, I would think, but you'll keep us posted, right? So thank you both and we'll have a round of applause for the speakers and we're doing well on time. So I would ask if Todd Klessman is in the audience. There you are, Todd. Okay, so we'll just shift gears a little bit. Thank you very much, Mihal and Mike. I appreciate it very much. We'll switch gears a bit to our second panel and, you know, we've now talked about consumer chemicals and to some extent EPA and government oversight of dangerous chemicals. We now move actually towards facility, chemical facility safety and particularly I think physical and personnel security issues in the United States, but obviously this very much relates to the third panel on global security standards and safety. Let me introduce Todd Klessman first. Thank you, Todd, for coming and joining us. I know you've been talking about this issue quite a bit. Some of you may know that the Department of Homeland Security had a large conference last week in Alexandria that some of us attended on chemical safety and security. So Todd Klessman is Senior Policy Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security's Infrastructure Security Compliance Division. He's Senior Policy Advisor. He serves as a technical authority on the chemical facility anti-terrorism standards, sometimes called CFATS, is that right? CFATS CFATS regulation and the secure handling of ammonium nitrate provisions of the Homeland Security Act and is responsible for providing advice and counsel to the ISCD, once again the Infrastructure Security Compliance Division Director and Deputy Director. So I know Todd, with the recent attack on a chemical facility in France, which wasn't all that successful, but in fact, as I understand it broke through the front gates and caused a fire and it seems to me this is kind of the tolling bell a little bit or the first signal of potential concern about the safety and security on-site of chemical, a wide variety of chemical facilities. So we look forward to your presentation and I'll turn everything over to you. Well thank you very much for having me here today and that's a very good segue into the presentation as the very first slide asks the question why do we care about chemical facility security these days and the attack in Lyon is certainly one example of why this remains such an important topic to the Department of Homeland Security. What we have seen throughout the years is that unfortunately our adversary continues to evolve and creates a persistent threat to the United States and it's interest both here and abroad. When most people think of incidents that concern chemicals, they usually think of one or two things. They think of chemical weapons, which as we've heard for the most part has been eliminated under the Chemical Weapons Convention, or they think of incidents like the toxic release back in Bhopal a couple of decades ago. And those types of events are certainly concerns for the Department, but they're not the only things we need to consider when we look at chemicals in the risk they pose. Chemicals obviously are extremely valuable integral part of almost every aspect of society, but some of those characteristics that they present obviously also create some potential for misuse. So up here we have two pictures of some of the events of the past few years. The one on top is an explosion in West Texas at the West Fertilizer Plants. It was an ammonium nitrate explosion that killed about 15 folks. This was an accident. This was not an intentional attack, at least as far as all the reports have shown. But it shows that we're talking about things where people could turn a facility in essence into a weapon, weaponized a facility much like the terrorists did in 9-11. They took something that we would not have expected as a weapon and turned it into that. And that presents a significant concern for the Department. Chemical facilities are often not always located in rural areas, often located in rural areas, but sometimes in much higher population areas where a release either of a toxic, an explosive, or a flammable hazard could cause significant harm to the population surrounding the facility. The second one is a picture from Syria, from the chlorine gas that had been used. And this is a theme that a lot of people don't think about when they think of facility security, but actually is the predominant concern that we're seeing among our related population. And that is the theft or diversion of materials from a facility for use off-site. So we're talking about things that could be used as chemical weapons or their precursors, weapons of mass destruction, or probably of the most concern, and what we've seen used most widely throughout the world, is chemicals as improvised explosive devices or explosives. So the Department looked at this threat, realized that the chemical industry was taking some steps to help secure their facilities and secure their materials, but they weren't doing it across the board. So we worked with Congress, and I guess it's going on about eight or nine years ago, Congress enacted legislation that provided the Department with regulatory authority over chemical facility security. So as we know, chemical facility safety has been under regulatory authority within the United States for many decades. We just obviously spent a good portion of time talking about one of the earlier regulatory requirements on the safety side. But from security, nothing existed really prior to 9-11. What Congress did was, in essence, sneak something into an appropriations bill. After many years of trying to come up with compromise on significant legislation, they snuck about a one-and-a-half-page bill into the Appropriations Act that authorized the Department to regulate quote-unquote high-risk chemical facilities. As you'll see, both of these terms were undefined. They gave us a lot of leeway in doing things, and we'll talk about how the Department decided to unravel this. And while we did face some missteps early on and some challenges to overcome, I think we've hit our stride over the past few years, and that was recognized by Congress last year who finally authorized us on a slightly more permanent basis in December of this past year, giving us four-year authorization under the Protecting and Securing Chemical Facilities from Terrace Attacks Act of 2014. So I think both us and industry are pleased to see this regulation staying for the foreseeable future, and we hope it remains in place for a long time to come. Now, because high-risk chemical facility was undefined, the Department first asked, who do we really want to regulate? What do we think Congress was concerned about? What do we think the nation should be concerned about? And what we decided was it didn't really matter what type of facility these chemicals were at. The chemicals are going to present threats or risk based on their nature, not necessarily the type of facility. So rather than say we're going to regulate manufacturers or warehouses or distributors, the Department developed a list of about 325 chemicals, which we termed chemicals of interest. And each one of these chemicals will present one or more security issues that the Department cares about. There's a series of release hazards, toxics, flammables, and explosives. There's a series of theft aversion hazards under the chemical weapons or their precursors, explosives or IED precursors, or weapons of mass destruction. And then finally, sabotage hazards, which are in essence chemicals that when mixed with water will turn into a release toxic hazards. The Department set threshold levels for each one of these chemicals, much like the EPA's risk management program did for their list of chemicals. Anyone who possessed above a threshold level of any one of these chemicals is going to provide some basic information to the Department. From there we'll look at their risk. If we determine that they are high risk, there's going to be a series of additional requirements, which I'll go over in a couple minutes. Now what this means is we regulate a large swath of industry that is not necessarily limited to what most people would think of as traditional chemical facilities. So up here are the 10 NIACS codes. Those are sort of industry codes that people will self-report to us, which explains what sort of business they're in. Not surprising, the top of the list are going to be their manufacturers, your wholesale, your retailers. But then you'll start seeing some things that I don't think would consider themselves chemical facilities. You get down to utilities and mines, agricultural facilities. We get colleges and universities around here. Some of the more interesting ones, hospitals and clinics, we've got 10 wineries so far who are subject to the program, and three prisons are actually subject to the PFATS regulation. So you'll see it's a very interesting problem we're facing. It's not a small group represented by a single industry association, but really a broad spectrum of folks from around the country who are going to have to register with the department and let us determine if they are a high-risk facility or not. So here's the process that we use within the department. It's a 12-step process. I think like any good sobering program, it should have 12 steps in it. What we've done here is spent the first couple portions of the program to try to identify those facilities at a high risk. So again, it's going to start with a facility looking at that list of chemicals and determining whether or not they possess a threshold level. If they do, they're going to provide us very basic information through an online assessment tool that we call the top screen tool. In essence, they're going to provide us where they're located, what chemicals they have on site, the quantity and the manner in which they store them. So what we're going to do with that assessment on are those things that could be stolen and diverted from issues or what would happen if they were released in the community surrounding that facility. In essence, what we're trying to do is take the scope of hundreds of thousands of facilities out of that use chemicals, narrow it down with our list of 325 chemicals of interest, get those facilities to provide some basic information without too much burden on them and identify the ones that are most likely to be high risk. And I think we have some statistics a couple slides down, but we've received over 40,000 of those top screen assessments to date and we'd initially determined about 8,000 or so of those as potentially high risk. So you'll see about at that point in time, it was 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 would fall out of the program. They'd get a notice from us saying, thank you for the information. We don't believe you're high risk. You have no further obligations unless you make a significant change to your chemical holdings. The folks who received the other letter like you present some aspects of high risk, they're going to be required to complete a security vulnerability assessment or an SVA. That SVA is going to give us some more information to provide an even better consequence assessment of the materials associated with them as well as look a little bit the vulnerabilities and the threats associated with that specific facility. Based on that we'll make a final risk determination, a high risk determination. And if a facility does end up being high risk we will divide it into one of four tiers. The lowest of the high risk, tier 4 being the lowest of the high risk but still a high risk facility. And today we have about 3,000 or so facilities that are in that high risk status. With another 400 or so that are in that earlier preliminary stage that we still have to review their security vulnerability assessments. It is a very dynamic population. The chemical industry and these other associated industries are very dynamic, always changing. So those numbers are almost always in flux. But 3,000 or so facilities has been our ballpark number for a few years now. So it seems like it's stabilized around that total. For those 3,000 or so facilities this is where security really becomes a part of it. They're now going to be required to develop a site security plan that's going to address 18 risk-based performance standards. So what that means is rather than give prescriptive standards and tell a facility they must have this type of fence or they must have this type of camera system we've identified 18 areas of security and I believe a slide or two down will show all 18. So let's say to the facility tell us how you guys are going to address this. Tell us how you're going to address perimeter security or cyber security or the insider threat or shipping and receiving. In essence that allows them flexibility to build on things they already have in place. Recognizes the fact that these are not one size fits all security solutions. Obviously a college university is going to have a very different risk profile and ability to implement security measures than a private warehouse might have. It also makes it so that the terrorist cannot simply read our manual and determine how they can overcome our security. If we had a requirement that said you must have a 10 foot fence then the terrorist could go build an 11 foot ladder. This allows them to not know what they're going to be facing anytime they see a CFAT facility. So this is something that makes the program more challenging. It requires a much better relationship between the department and the regulated community. It's not simply a checklist that we can go and look at but it's almost a negotiated contract between the department and each individual facility. But we think from a security perspective and from a cost benefit perspective it's the right approach. And then finally there's a series of reviews both at headquarters. We have chemists, chemical engineers, physical security specialists, cyber security specialists. They'll holistically look at the plans and make a determination as to if it's acceptable or not. And then we have about 120 or so inspectors around the country who will go and inspect the facility both prior to approval of the site security plan and then following approval of a site security plan they'll do periodic compliance inspections to make sure the facilities are implementing the plans as they are required to. So this is a quick look at those risk-based performance standards. Again, it really covers every aspect of security. It goes from looking at the overall perimeter to looking at securing the site assets. It looks at physical and cyber. There's deter, detect and delay. There's going to be administrative procedures. So we want to make sure the facility is doing proper record keeping and training its staff and has an organization that knows how to respond and handle incidents, makes them consider elevated threats. What happens if the department raises its threat level or finds out a specific threat about an industry segment or unique facility. All of this is going to be documented in their site security plans they submit to us. And these can range anywhere from a couple dozen pages to over a thousand pages long. So depending on the size and complexity of the facility, these can be fairly significant plans. Frankly, we think none of them should probably over a thousand pages. We are working with the regulated community to modify our system. We have an online tool that helps them reach step of the process and we can greatly streamline those efforts. So we're working to improve it. But the point is this is a very comprehensive look. We're not cherry picking individual aspects, but they really are going to have to address all aspects of security risk associated with their chemicals on site. So here's some of the numbers that I've talked about already. It looks like this has been updated since last time with presentation. It now says we've received over 50,000 top screens. It's from about 37,000 unique facilities. So you can see there's a good number of the population who is changing their chemical holdings. And there's one of two ways that this is typically happening. Some of it's just a normal course of business. They may be a warehouse or a batch operator or a company that is just frequently changing what chemicals they have on site and often change the quantities of chemicals of interest. But what we've also seen is that a large number of facilities have voluntarily decided after looking at our regulation that instead of implementing security measures to protect the chemicals they have on site, they can make changes to their chemical holdings. They can look at things that are inherently safer and either substitute their chemicals or frankly eliminate them if they're not using them anymore. And we've had about 3,000 facilities that have received a preliminary high risk tier based on their holdings. Come back to the department inform us of changes they've made and document those changes so it's not simply they're removing it and then once we let them out of the program they're getting the chemical back but providing some assurances that they don't have that chemical and they've reduced their risk to a point where they're no longer covered by CFATs and from the department's perspective that's a win. Our goal here is not to make every chemical facility a fortress it's to make sure that the security risks that facilities have on site are properly addressed and that where they can find ways, creative ways to eliminate those risks that's a victory for everybody. The bottom chart shows how we've broken down the current population through the different tiers. As you'll see tier 1 and tier 2 are a smaller portion of the population and that makes sense those are the highest of the high risk. Those are the ones that are going to have the most significant security requirements going to be inspected more frequently so those are the ones that are truly presenting the highest risks. So there's only about 100 of those tier 1s and about 350 or so of those tier 2s. The bulk of the population is going to be tier 3 and tier 4 facilities and frankly most of those facilities if they have basic security practices that you would expect from a mature business operation they're probably 80 to 90% of the way to CFAT's compliance. If they're doing basic background checks on their employees if they're locking up their inventories at night they may have a simple camera system there if they're following their EPA requirements they should have already been in touch with their first responders. If they're taking those typical steps they're not going to have to do much to comply with the CFAT's program we're going to help maybe fill that 10 to 20% gap and then just verify through inspections that they are doing what they have said in paper they're going to do. Now the program is only about 8 years old and it did take a while for us to get all this off ground. We were building each one of these steps along the way so you'll see for the first number of years we hadn't done any authorizations or inspections and we really started in earnest back in 2013 and late 2013 early 2014 is where the program really started to hit its stride and took off. So out of the 3,000 or so facilities we've authorized the site security plan which means we've reviewed the site security plan at headquarters and determined that it looks good on paper for over 3,000 facilities. Now that's more than the number of facilities I mentioned that are currently final tiered. That's because a number of those about 500 or so have actually since made changes they're in that group that has made changes to their chemical holdings and are no longer high risk. So we're not at completely 100% authorization but we are getting close and expect to be there by the end of the year. Authorization inspections that next phase we've hit over 2 thirds of the facilities and this slide's a little bit outdated on approvals which is really the golden ticket that says you're in compliance. We're just about at our 2,000th approval. So about 2 thirds of the way through approving all the site security plans we're approving them at about 80 to 100 per month so we think about another year, year and a half and hopefully all of the facilities that are high risk in the country will approve site security plans. That final blue line at the bottom is the compliance inspection. That's the repeated visits that we'll do to just make sure they're implementing their site security plans and we're really just starting those. Right now we're doing only about 5 or 10 a month more to gain lessons learned, figure out the best protocols for doing it while we're still getting everyone to the approved status but that'll really be the steady state of the program. Once everyone hits approval in essence what we'll be doing is focusing on compliance inspections as our full-time additional impacts that we've seen. I mentioned the second bullet already that's the 3,000 or so chemical facilities that have eliminated reduced or otherwise made modifications to their chemical holdings. But one other thing that we've noticed is 74% or nearly 3 fourths of all facilities have included what we call a plan measure. So in your site security plan after you do your assessment you're going to identify your vulnerabilities or your gaps and then you're going to identify measures you're going to put in place and give us a time frame on how quickly you're going to do it. Those measures that aren't yet in place are called plan measures. So what we're seeing is that only about 25% of the facilities that are coming into the CFATS program already have security standards that are meeting every aspect we would care about. At least 3 out of every 4 are implementing new measures. Now these could be wholesale new security programs or it could be something as small as adding a backup generator so that they know their lights and their camera systems are still going to work if the power goes out. It doesn't necessarily mean they're spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to implement these improvements. These could be minor improvements. But what it's showing is that almost everybody, overwhelming majority of the population of high risk chemical facilities has some aspect of security that they can improve and has been doing so as part of the CFATS program. The other regulatory provisions that the department has is focused solely on ammonium nitrate. Now ammonium nitrate as anyone familiar with terrorism knows this has been not only used in the United States but is probably the most commonly used chemical abroad in terrorist attacks around the world. In recognition of this Congress enacted a law that was very focused very targeted on the purchase and sale of ammonium nitrate and in essence authorized the department to require anyone who's going to buy or sell ammonium nitrate to register with the department have a background check where they're screened against the terrorist screening database for any known or suspected terrorist ties and then to provide identification at the point of sale so that the seller can verify the purchaser is who that person says they are and that they've been screened by the department. And then there's some additional requirements on the sellers themselves to maintain records and to report theft and loss of ammonium nitrate. We are still working on these regulations so as opposed to CFATS which has been in effect for a number of years the secure handling of ammonium nitrate provisions are still in the rulemaking process. We are hopefully very close to the final stages. We have gone through an advance notice of proposed rulemaking and a notice of proposed rulemaking. We've reviewed the comments, we've drafted internal responses to the comments and proposed rule and we're putting the final touches on it. It does not mean it will be out imminently for anyone familiar with the way rulemaking works in this country just because the department is close to a final rule does not mean it has cleared the many hurdles that still face it. So we are optimistic that we'll get something else in the not too distant future but we are still prohibited from projecting the time frame on that. Unfortunately, I can't speak too much more about the secure handling of ammonium nitrate program but we do think this has the potential to at least provide some additional level of regulatory authority over one of the most commonly used precursor items. And the last thing I just wanted to mention really quickly because I think it's important when we talk about safety and security is Executive Order 13650. That was the Executive Order that President Obama issued in the wake of the incident in West Texas. And this Executive Order required the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration to form an interagency working group and look at ways to do a number of things. Chief among them was better information sharing but not just amongst the federal agencies although that was a key as well but also improved operational and communicational work between the federal and the state and local entities between headquarters operations and our field forces on the ground and between the public and the facilities that reside in their area. Most of what happened in West Texas did not provide us information on how to better secure facility. It didn't really shed that much new light on safe handling of ammonium nitrate but it did identify some significant areas where there can be improvement between first responders in the federal government and the regulated facilities to identify ways that could better secure the communities make sure that our first responders know what they're walking into. It's not necessarily a need to improve regulations it's a need to make sure the regulations are being implemented in a smart cost effective manner and that the communities are involved in the process. So this is something that if you're interested in this area I would recommend that you take a look at the the group released a report to the president in June of last year that laid out a number of activities they had done since the release of the executive order but more importantly it was not an endpoint but really a milestone in our efforts and it talked about what we're planning on doing hopefully over the next five to ten years and there's still opportunity for folks to be engaged in that. Assuming that I would highly recommend you look at the Department of Labor's website the OSHA website. They've sort of become the central clearing house for executive order 13650 activities and they look at five thematic areas that we really appreciate industry and public comment and involvement and it's strengthening community planning and preparedness enhancing federal operational coordination improving data management modernizing policies and regulations and incorporating stakeholder feedback practices and again we can't do this alone the federal government knows that this is an area where the industry is controlling the majority of the infrastructure related to chemicals and the surrounding community has to be involved their first responders have to be involved so we really strongly encourage you to participate in this working group. With that I just wanted to share one final slide that's going to show you some resources in case you're interested in any of these programs I'm not going to walk through all of the email addresses and phone numbers the simplest thing to do for the CFATS program the chemical facility security program is to simply go to the department's website dhs.gov and type in chemical security and it'll be the first thing that pops up there's a wealth of resources there there's frequently asked questions there's ways to contact a help desk via email or telephone you can request outreach presentations we're happy to do large organizations or individual facilities our inspectors will do compliance assistance visits technical consultations we really see this as a partnership even though it's a regulatory program and want to work with facilities so please look to reach out to us if you can similarly if you're interested in the ammonia mitrate program I would go to dhs.gov and simply type in ammonia mitrate and that would be the first thing that pops up and then as I mentioned the executive order is the only one that's a little different that's on the OSHA website but if you go to OSHA.gov and type in executive order you should be able to find it so with that I'd be happy to take any questions a group might have thank you thank you very much Todd that was a really really very well organized you know quick quick slalom through a very complicated topic let me ask the first question then I'll turn to the audience but 37,000 facilities in the United States potentially reviewed on this I mean what mazes me is and probably most of you in the audience is there are that many facilities in the United States alone let alone the rest of the world that could be vulnerable to you know outside threats outside or insider threats has there been any pushback to implementing these regulations and security upgrades I can imagine that a lot of these facilities are quite small some of them kind of mom and pop operations which is what a lot of us worry about most I think and that implementing security upgrades like this could in some cases be quite expensive I would think it's what some of us have done over the prior couple decades you know in chemical weapons stockpile facilities which we had on some of them very very limited security up until 9-1-1 here in the United States so I'm wondering if there in fact has been some difficulty in obstacles to in fact improving security at sites in the last in the last you know five or eight years as you say that's a very good question first in regards to the 37,000 number I think it just goes to show the importance of chemicals in our society and the ubiquity that some of these chemicals have I mean some of the ones we see most frequently are things that people in this audience probably have at their house chlorine I've got in my house for my pool if you have fertilizer you probably have an ammonium nitrate mixture some other nitrate mixture that we're going to care about propane is one of the big ones obviously we're not going to regulate the small size of propane that's in what have in their backyard but industrial size uses of these tanks are used as well for heating throughout the agricultural and other industries so it does seem like a big number but we were actually somewhat surprised that we were able to get it that reduced estimates early on were that out of these 300 or so chemicals that anywhere between 100,000 to over a million facilities possess different quantities of these chemicals so there is a large number that's why we hopefully built a structure that has a minimal burden up front and lets us identify the couple thousand a few thousand that are more likely to present the highest risks as far as costs that is absolutely a legitimate concern we have heard throughout the years and it is something that I think is one of the biggest benefits of having this flexible performance standard approach versus a prescriptive approach is that it allows facilities to look at what they're already doing and use things they already may have in place as part of their security requirements or to identify what's most cost-effective to them it's not necessarily having to put in new guards guns and gates it could be a company that has fozging at seven different facilities and decides that you know what we don't really need it at seven different facilities we can consolidate it at a single facility properly secure it in one location and those other six facilities would no longer be covered by the regulations so there's lots of different approaches they can use the level of security sophistication and security in place varies greatly based on the company so we really see everything from complex multinational corporations to a very small mom and pop organizations who have one person who is doing their environment, their health, their safety their security and also their sales and their business operations and everything else but again it is something we are willing to work with and industry has been very supportive of this regulation what they learned very early on after 9-11 was there were a lot of companies who understood the concerns and were spending a lot of money to secure themselves and there wasn't an even playing field they wanted to make sure the baseline was there not only from a profit margin standpoint because obviously security can cost money but also because if there's an incident at any facility it's going to hurt the entire chemical industry so they wanted to make sure their partners within the industry were also stepping up to the plate so while no one is happy about incurring additional costs this has been very well received by industry. Great with that I think I'll just open it up and see I think everyone can understand this is a very very serious program and hopefully has improved I assume it has greatly improved security here in the United States over the last decade yes in the back just please identify yourself first My name is Ezra Kaplan I'm a reporter with Medill News Service and I'm curious there's no so the ammonium nitrate is there anything that's actually gone into effect already? I understand that the rulemaking process can be arduous and very very lengthy but is there anything in place at this point? Not under the secure handling of ammonium nitrate provisions but ammonium nitrate is one of the chemicals of interest under the CFATS program so facilities that have significant quantities of ammonium nitrate likely would have had to register with us and implement security measures and then I would be remiss to say we've been already mixed with fuel oil so when it's actually in its explosive state would be regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms under their explosives laws so in a finished state it is regulated as well Yes, right here David Abreu from the State Department I just want to know since there's been a lot of success with these programs have other countries copied some of our methods or have we even looked at as a role model? We've had a number of countries throughout the years who have reached out to us to learn a lot more about the program one of the things that we say to them when we speak to them is it is not a program that makes sense for every nation out there we recognize that the United States has a long history of regulatory activity has a very stable government has a very sophisticated industry in this area and because of 9-11 and the aftermath and the way the security was unfolding within the industry regulations made sense for the United States it's not necessarily a panacea it's not necessarily something every country should use that said we are always happy to talk to other countries about the best practices at a minimum we have certainly learned a lot through this regulation about how the industry is securing themselves what activities work what don't so we work very closely through a variety of forum both in bilateral engagements as well as in multinational engagements to share the lessons we've learned over the past years and frankly also to learn from what other countries are doing we certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas in this country so we recognize a lot of the good work that's going on out there and are happy to see that it has been recognized what we're doing in other countries coming to us for some guidance and leadership in the area Ambassador Patura you had your hand up Thank you Todd I would like to stress for elements from the program which are very important internationally which I witness in the second consecutive chemical security summit but the approaches we developed are very unique the first approach we developed is integration of chemical security at the local level this is critically important because whatever happens happens at the local level and this is a way we are now promoting internationally secondly which is very important is whole government approach and multi stakeholder approach which is also part of your vision and which is this vision is now shared very much internationally and I can tell you that working with Ambassador Jenkins internationally we are promoting this approach that you cannot deal with chemicals without local communities without industry without civil society and without administration thirdly what is also very attractive in this approach is that you move attention from big chemicals which are well secured to small and medium companies which are by the way the biggest producer in terms of volumes of chemicals and transportation of chemicals which is very vulnerable areas and fourthly I think that you also developed a very good cooperation with the industry I would like to stress I observed this for several years already that DHS programs developed with the industry are not only unique they are perfectly suited to be implemented internationally therefore what we are also trying to do is to implement and internationalize and operationalize the program developed within United States therefore when we look at this debate also previous debate which was very attractive debate for me how this US legislative process looks like as a practitioner I can say that there are enough regulations around the world for toxic chemicals we have to really internationalize and operationalize the best existing practices and in my view the way taken by Homeland Security is very right in that thank you very much Todd thanks Paul just very briefly Todd is being very modest because both Todd and DHS have a large role in helping to develop what's a strategic plan that we develop for the global partnership which I will talk about in the next panel but he's been very helpful in developing a plan for 29 countries to try to as Ambassador Patrick said internationalize this effort so I just wanted to since you're on the stage and you didn't mention it I just wanted to say thank you for that and I'll talk a little bit more about that do you want to respond Todd to any of that there's a lot to respond to I know from a lot of our work that we do in developing countries maybe to your question from State Department when you talk to developing countries I'm thinking particularly of a few in the Middle East right now I won't mention them they have very little control as far as I can determine over their chemical import and export business they have very little control over the management and the use the management and disposal of chemicals and when you ask them do they feel secure do they believe their chemicals are secure in their laboratory or their manufacturing facility or their university studies whatever they always say absolutely not we're really worried that some of these could disappear overnight and part of it is customs and border control control part of it is simply money I mean there isn't the money that provides security there isn't the management leadership and expertise to provide good security and safety and there isn't adequate disposal facilities which are safe and sound like auto-claves of hospitals for example that dispose of medical waste and chemicals so it's a complicated issue and I think potentially internationally dangerous issue that could explode literally on us at any point in time and that's why I'm really pleased to see the initiative of our Polish colleagues here in the International Centre on Chemical Safety and Security we have a couple more questions and we're getting almost to the next panel and then I'll turn it over to Sharon Squastoni here but in the back my name is Patrick Wicklund I work for the Foreign Agricultural Service at USDA and I'm currently the the Ballywick of the interagency work that we do with the State Department so I haven't worked with DHS at all on this issue so I'm fascinated by it and I want to learn more what kind of overlap is there with the chemicals of interest list at DHS and State Departments and do you work with the Chemical Security Program at the State Department or do you work with USDA at all? Yes, we have been very fortunate to work with both the USDA State Department and pretty much every other member of the alphabet soup in the federal government when the Department of Homeland Security first stood up they developed something called Government Coordinating Council and Sector Coordinating Council for each one of the major industry segments which is a chemical government coordinating council that we are a member of that that meets repeatedly that has representatives from all these different agencies and frankly under Ambassador Jenkins leadership and guidance we've established an interagency group in the U.S. to help focus on some of our international efforts I don't know if USDA has been there in the past but we would certainly be more than happy to add you to the list and have you as part of the discussion but we have had pretty good robust dialogue and are always looking for other people working in this area so be happy to talk with you before I leave and exchange cards and Todd is your PowerPoint available to people? If we made it available on our website or something we could was there one last hand up I saw or Sharon you had a question or back here yes I get to ask a dumb question is the last one No questions are dumb here so don't worry What is the distribution of ammonium nitrate by quantity of facilities of concern geographical distribution Sure I do not know the answer to that one off hand Why don't you know that? I have chemicals in 3,000 facilities so it's hard to keep track of them all I'm going to know where I'm supposed to keep out of them A related question is do we have a good database Todd of all the incidents at chemical facilities potential break-ins major accidents I think that would be one key area too Does the chemical safety board maintain that or anything? I'm getting a little bit from my program so I hope no one especially the reporters in the back are not quoting me on this one but suspicious activity reports thefts those sorts of things should be going both to the FBI and to the NIC which I'm going to forget what the acronym stands for so I'm not going to try and then safety incidents should have their own reporting procedure as well I'm not sure they necessarily overlap with the cases of both whether there's a consolidated database that's both safety and security I am not aware of it And we know that the OPSW and the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons under the chemical weapons convention requires an annual declaration of all imports and exports of dual use chemicals that come under the schedules of the chemical weapons convention so there should be that available too Thank you, Todd. A very good presentation And I'll turn the podium over here to Sharon and our third and last panel Thank you all for your good attention so far Alright so I would like to invite everyone to come back from your mini coffee break for our last panel but certainly not least we have thank you we are now going to open up the the aperture to the global level and we are going to start with Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins who's going to talk about the global partnership on the chemical security sub working group and then also invite Ambassador Paturi and Dr. Gaquely to talk about the case, the specific case of Kenya Bonnie just briefly introduce our speakers and I apologize if you can continue the conversation outside, thanks Bonnie Jenkins is now the State Department's coordinator for threat reduction programs and the U.S. Representative to the G8 Global Partnership against the spread of weapons of mass destruction I have known her for a long time and Bonnie's accomplishments just keep growing so I'm really pleased to have her as our first speaker we've already introduced Ambassador Paturi and but finally I'd like to introduce Dr. Ali Gaquely who is the Deputy Government Chemist in the Kenyan Ministry of Health he's also a key member of the National Authority on the implementation of the CWC in Kenya and he's the National Focal Point for the EU for those of you who know this alphabet soup CBRN Centers of Excellence it's ChemBio Radiological Nuclear so I'm going to turn it over to Bonnie our goal is to leave time for your questions because you have great questions so I invite our speakers to spend you know 10-15 minutes and then we'll turn to Q&A thank you thanks Sharon and thanks to for arranging this and to Ali and also a colleague I think I've known all of you quite a few years now so it's great to be here it's great to see CCSIS looking at this issue of chemical safety and security I know that Kristoff and I have been pounding the miles internationally promoting this issue for quite a while now so it's great to always have more folks, institutions individuals, organizations joining this issue and focusing on the importance of the work I'm going to start off by talking about the global partnership because it's an initiative that is looking at this issue but it's also a place where a number of the other actors can are meeting on a regular basis to discuss chemical safety and security so I think what will come out of this is a recognition of the fact that as Kristoff said earlier that this is an issue that really is multi-stakeholder in terms of the different organizations and entities that need to be involved in this and unlike the other areas of security whether nuclear nuclear and biological or re-logical so much of the work is in the industry and outside government that it really poses a very unique opportunity to work with entities outside government to ensure this security that we need in chemical precursors too much going on here okay just very briefly for background on the global partnership for those of you who may not know about it it was established in 2002 as official working group of the G-8 which as you know is now the G-7 and its goal is to provide funding and to coordinate programs in the area of chemical, biological nuclear, re-logical or CBRN security and it's been around obviously since 2002 originally a 10-year mandate to raise 20 billion dollars in total to do this important work make sure I'm on the right page here in 2011 when we were looking at hold on a second great okay I don't have my glasses on if you see me squinting that's why in 2011 there was an assessment done by the global partnership and the reason why we did this is because we realized that the partnership was starting to come to an end in 2012 and there was really a desire to think about extending this beyond the original mandate and so the global partnership members got together and did a document called the assessment document and really provided an opportunity to look at what had happened so they think it would provide this to the then G-8 leaders for decision on whether to extend the global partnership beyond 2012 it was recognized that at that time the global partnership members had spent well over 20 million dollars 21 million dollars even though it says 20 here on the issue of seabird insecurity and this did not count funding that the U.S. for example had been doing outside Russia and Ukraine the two main countries focused on the global partnership and there was also work that some other countries were doing so the amount that we had counted at that time was not really reflective of all the work that was being done in production efforts around the world it was noted in the chemical weapons destruction section what had been done in 2011 what had been done by that time and as most of you know most of the funding for the global partnership was dedicated to destroying Russian chemical weapons and Russian nuclear submarines and also what was provided by Germany at the time when they thought about the future of the global partnership in 2011 not a lot of thinking was actually on chemical weapons per se we were thinking much more on nuclear and biological weapons and because so much money had been spent by the global partnership members on chemical weapons destruction facilities and I think that there was somewhat of a fatigue for all the money that was spent in Russia however Germany did propose a section in the assessment document that recognized that new chemical weapon challenges may arise in the future and that the GA global partnership would be able to focus on that and so interestingly enough when Syria happened even though it wasn't done as a GP directed program and the destruction was done under the OPCW it was all global partnership members that funded all the work for the destruction of chemical weapons in Syria based on the assessment that was done in 2011 later that year the then G8 leaders agreed to extend the global partnership beyond 2012 and they agreed to do a number of things from expanding work to all regions of the world not just focusing on Russia any longer in addition I should say in addition to Russia not in instead but looking at other parts of the world as well focusing on biosecurity, nuclear and radiological security scientist engagement and implementation in 1540 as well as bringing in new members I'm looking at my slides I don't think they're the same but I'm going to keep going anyway so the number of things were started under the global partnership when the US chaired in 2012 we decided to focus on a lot more on new members we wanted to include all global partnership members in our meetings because actually before that time there was a kind of bifurcation where there were four meetings a year only twice a year were there members for the entire global partnership included for all the meetings we decided to invite a number of relevant organizations to all of the meetings so before that there were no international organizations that attended any of the meetings we decided to invite all of them to the meetings and then we decided to invite a number of think through developing some sub-working groups because we wanted to have more focused discussion especially when the global partnership was extended in 2012 there was a lot of questions about what are we going to do a lot of countries who had been funding work under the global partnership had not done any work outside Russia they just started doing assistance programs when the global partnership began unlike the US who had been doing work under the non-lugar program since the early 1990s so a lot of focus was on what are we going to do, where are we going to go how much is it going to cost to do with the different types of seabaring security projects around the world and so we wanted to establish sub-working groups in the slides that you saw on each of the substantive areas of work with a bio, chem, nuclear redological difference of working groups for all of those in addition to sub-working groups that focused on centers of excellence as well as bringing in new members and this slide shows who the global partnership members are currently some of the international organizations that are involved have really helped increase the coordination and we really feel this is the area of chemical security as I've shown in another slide it increased the information exchange among the members with the international organizations who attend, promotes more funding of international organizations of what they're doing with seabaring security it brought the discussions of what's going on in these organizations into the discussions of the now 29 members of the global partnership and there were real clear benefits that we saw in speaking with OPCW on a regular basis UNODA, UNODC a lot of these organizations who are doing work in chemical area or related to the chemical area these are just some of the international organizations on the chemical side there are a number also on the bio and the nuclear redological who are not on this slide but related to chemicals these are the ones that I highlighted who attend the meetings and engage with the regular conversations on chemical security on an international scale this is the EU only because a lot of folks realize as part of the G7 the EU has always been a part of the G8 now G7 discussions but it's also important to have them there because they do a lot of work on CBRN security and so having them in the discussions on chemical security what's going on internationally on projects and activities to promote chemical security around the world and how those efforts can be incorporated into work that the chemical engagement program at state that was mentioned already and other programs that are going on how they can all be coordinated to make sure that we are doing the best we can in terms of the funding that's going on in chemical security the chemical secretists of working group was actually established in 2012 under the US chairmanship it was first chaired by the UK under their chairmanship of the G8 the chairs are Poland and Ukraine two countries who have taken a very strong and capable leadership of the sub-working group and they continue to lead that today the first two years what we did in the US is we did establish an interagency working group to look at how look at the projects and activities that the US is doing internationally and we made up a matrix that we provided to the global partnership of what our activities are across the US government we did not have USDA I heard the question so we need to make sure that we have them involved as well but we encourage other countries to do the same so we had a number of matrices from countries on what they are doing in chemical safety and security and we discussed the needs that exist in an international community in terms of chemical safety and security and this culminated in a strategic plan that was led very capable by Poland and Ukraine and also with strong input from Todd Klessman and his colleagues at DHS as well as colleagues from FBI and for the US our leads are DHS and the FBI I just see some areas of vulnerability that I think a lot of you are probably aware of I just want to list some of the things we were looking at as we were developing our strategic plan for the global partnership we looked at developing the need for chemical inventory systems for all uses of chemicals whether universities, research facilities, chemical warehouses and manufacturers we looked at vulnerability and acquisition of chemicals by non-state actors in the chemical supply chain in distribution systems and the fact that where you have legislation tracking chemicals and voluntary security standards that are used by chemical distributors that's a great way to promote general security we also looked at storage security we talked a lot today about physical security issues and we also looked at the chemical supply chain which has been one of the areas that we always here is one of the greatest areas of vulnerability is transportation security and we looked at the importance of developing in the international community ways in which we could strengthen the supply chain we still have ways to go of course in the US in terms of this issue but also ways in which we can help model what works here and what works in other countries to see how we can promote some of the correct ways to strengthen chemical security and transportation I'm figuring through my notes here we looked at national implementation of chemical safety and security practices that will allow individual companies to better address the threat of non-state actors and mitigating risk flows by chemical weapons, chemical security best practices that must be implemented across the world from large manufacturing facilities down to small industry and once again as Kristoff noted small industries and middle industry those of the industries that we think we have heard require a great deal of security assistance so moving on to the strategic plan this was developed actually over a year it was agreed to at the recent global partnership meeting in April and it had input from a number of international organizations like the OPCW, Interpol and a number of other ones UNODC, UNODA led again as I said by Ukraine and Poland and assisted very strongly by our colleagues from DHS and FBI we have a strategic plan that's going to lay the groundwork for the future work of the global partnership in terms of strengthening chemical security and I've just put somebody areas that are focused in the strategic plan from fostering collaboration on national, regional and global security initiatives and here you see a number of initiatives that are mentioned here early highlighted the fact that in order to address this issue globally we need to work with a lot of organizations whether it's the OPCW, Interpol the EU, the OSCE civil society and of course industry we also highlight strengthening supporting the enforcement of chemical non-proliferation instruments enhancing security of chemicals and transit also as part of the strategic plan coordinating and engagement of chemical security enhancement programs to coordinate donors and chemical security programs and projects to assist in making an efficient outcome of this chemical security effort the different actors that we're engaged with are listed on this slide I won't go through them in detail right here I do mention a couple of them in the future slides but these are just the different actors who are involved in working with the global partnership chemical security sub-working group and community just highlighting briefly the Interpol Interpol is working very closely with global partnership members getting funded by global partnership members I took a portion of their off of their website about their support of member countries to deter detect and disrupt the use of chemicals and terrorist incidents and they were at each and every single global partnership meeting that we've had and we're working very closely with them the OPCW of course is doing a lot in terms of outreach on chemical security and safety going to a number of countries to promote chemical security as an awareness opportunity in terms of what's important for chemical security and promoting global gathering engaging the international community including governments, chemical industry science, academia and non-government organizations chemical security in Ukraine is highlighted because last year the global partnership had a special meeting on Ukraine on cyber and security efforts and as a result of that we've been having a number of projects and discussions with Ukraine. Ukraine has been a partner of the global partnerships in 2004 and so there are a number of activities that the U.S. and global partnership is doing to promote chemical security in Ukraine and I think Kristoff will say something about that getting toward the end we have something called the Berlin Group which was established earlier this year in Berlin and it's an effort to promote chemical security culture as part of an overall cyber and security cultural effort this has a number of individuals from government, non-government sector, international organizations who are all working on how do we promote cyber and security culture because as we all know, cyber and security will not be sustainable or not work in the end if you don't have the individuals who are actually engaged in this effort truly understanding the importance of why they're doing what they're doing this library briefly just highlights some of the points that were made as part of chemical security culture in terms of one size does not fit all, chemical security can learn from nuclear radiological security culture efforts and we must determine how do we access chemical security culture how do we do self-assessments on chemical security culture we also have been working with the OSCE and of course with our colleague on some of the efforts that's going on in Ukraine and I'm sure that you will go through some of these I just put it here to highlight the different parts of the governments and non-governmental sectors that we're working with in a global partnership this highlights some of the discussions that have taken place with the OSCE on Ukraine once again I think Kristoff will go into details but it's a very important effort we're trying to do to promote chemical security in Ukraine which is one of our strong partners in the global partnership finally Security Council Resolution 1540 I think most of you know what this is we have experts that attend every one of our global partnership meetings and one of their ideas of course is to promote global partnership engagement and fostering of CBRN security as well as CBRN security culture and of course that's an important part of strengthening chemical security worldwide is abiding by 1540 resolution requirements and I guess the last thing I'll point out and I apologize if the slides didn't quite go with everything but the last thing I want to point out is we have been doing these listening sessions with Department of Homeland Security with State Department and DHS meeting with industry just to look at just to talk with them about some of the just kind of brainstorming with some of the ideas and how we can promote chemical security worldwide. Number of them they have plans internationally around the world and a lot of them are promoting chemical security based on their US standards in different countries so we talked to them about what do they think about ways in which we can promote chemical security internationally based on all the experience that they have and that's just the last slide to talk about some of the other actors in this effort of multi stakeholder effort and these are some of the next steps which you can look at the slides we'll provide to you but essentially it's how do we strengthen everything that you've seen, how do we keep strengthening all of that work with all of these actors to promote chemical security worldwide and thank you. Thank you Bonnie, I'm going to turn the microphone over now to Ambassador Petruy. Thank you very much I'm very grateful that I can speak after Ambassador Jenkins she succeeded in bringing to the world community the relevance of CBRN security in its entirety which is chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear you tend to think through nuclear cloud, for you everything is nuclear security in the world much more relevant given to chemical and biosecurity everybody is for everyone and everybody is a part of their life and we have to ensure that they deal with them safely and in security I'm grateful to Ambassador Jenkins for his efforts to really build this global approach to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear security and we are succeeding in this. I came here to convince you about the relevance of chemical security in this context. I'm not going to speak more about the center I have an honour to run but I would like to bring you to your attention the relevance of very important developments made here in the United States with regard to solutions and potential best practices developed to promote worldwide chemical security. I spoke a few minutes ago about these elements, about these programs promoted by State Department, Homeland Security but also by U.S. industry. I would like to move directly to what innovative we are bringing at the center to the table. We removed political language and methodologies of chemical disarmament chemical non-proliferation and chemical tourism. Today global threats and challenges link to the globalization of spread of chemical, biological radiological and nuclear industries and materials require global approach going beyond political groupings. Recently we had a failure of NPT review conference I was in every NPT review conference 90 and this failure is important failure for us. One of the answers is reasons is because it's too much politicized we are, we maintain language from 60s and 70s to the situation of 21st century we have to remove political language as I tell you, I understand the terminology of nuclear non-proliferation but you not understand as an expert with 25 years experience chemical non-proliferation. In the last review conference of the chemical weapons convention which I have the honor to share successfully because we had the final document of this review conference. We remove this political language concept of preventing reemergence chemical weapons because this is an issue we should ensure that they are not a period anymore. We also remove the language of terrorists, chemical terrorism much more relevant issue is preventing misuse of toxic chemicals for any purpose, not in terrorism purposes. Therefore we are very successful in building global approaches. The summit which I would like to invite all of you the global summit on chemical security to be conducted in April 2000 in Poland is a new type of activity which we developed with worldwide community as a grassroots initiative, not government initiative as an initiative which combines different approaches and which is truly global. The program committee for this summit includes Ambassador Jenkins includes senior representative of Depp and Honsik, includes Paul Walker head of Green Cross but includes also former minister of of Russian Federation senior official from Iran Ambassador Fariavant head national author of Iran, representative of China, India, Egypt, South Africa I also hope that soon we would have Cuba on board of this committee. Therefore, we succeeded in making this process global and non-political in this place where, as you remember, how political is the debate on CBRN, it's a true IBD success. We introduced several important programs and this Kenyan program of state security is a very important pilot program very modern program. I hope that Dr. Aligakveli would introduce this program in detail. Finance from the Norwegian grant is a true approach which combines new vision of working with developing countries, not by bringing them assistance but assisting them in developing their own approaches and grassroots chemical security. I thought Jenkins mentioned about Ukraine. We developed the program integrated chemical security program for Ukraine together with OEC United Nations with chemical industry. We also introduced an implement worldwide program of local awareness and the responsible chemical security which fully, in my view combines our vision go local go to grassroots level go and work with all the relevant stakeholders go non-political, go to small and medium companies and go to cover transportations as well. I would like to finish my presentation by stressing the relevance of the summit which we are going to conduct in April as a tipping point for global efforts in chemical safety and security which will bring three major areas of activities, conference activities, traditional statements and presentations. Second area, exchange forum for demonstrations, best practice exchanges discussions among professionals and area three which is classical with exhibition activities. This summit brings three very innovative approaches. First is it is a first truly chemical safety security gathering, combining safety security. Secondly, it is not government-led initiative but grassroots level initiatives. Thirdly we as I mentioned it's going to be a truly global event free from political discussions in that sense and free from political limitations as I mentioned the program committee for the summit is composed of representatives of all the regions, countries and political groupings. I strongly believe as an expert and as the leader of the summit that we have to run two parallel processes. First is prototyping global chemical safety culture. This is a process which was also mentioned in the strategy vision of global partnership but also this process was initiated with the third review conference of the OPIS W and secondly we have to develop global market for chemical safety security. This is in my view one of the secrets how we can make the chemical security more relevant. Removing political limitations we can really succeed in developing global market for chemical security offering this solution available in the United States to everyone without politics because the same ship which is loaded in one of the countries can very easily come to US, the Netherlands, other countries should forget about providing security and safety based on political considerations. This is one of the fundamental issues we have to find and solve and I believe that chemical security is a great area because of its global approach for all of us to follow and I would like to finish by personal on personal note. The recent deal and there's an agreement with Iran on nuclear recent is paving the way to global chemical security. I'm convinced working with Iran for the last couple of years and also with several other countries as I mentioned with China with Russia with several others that we can really build global chemical security in coming years and this approach will modernize methodology for whole CBRN this approach will introduce regions to the regions like Middle East safety security. I'm strongly believe that the chemical security pays the way for global CBRN safety security. Thank you. Thank you, Ambassador. Did you leave copies of this brochure with everyone? You did. Okay, so this is the brochure about the global summit and it looks like it's going to be terrific. It's going to be great and I invite all of you, we were ready for a pretty long time to make it really an event which would be result oriented. Thank you. All right, so now we turn the microphone over to Dr. Gakweli. I want to thank everybody this evening and more specifically I'd like to thank the organizers of this meeting this evening and at the outset I would feel very humbled I would want to say that I'm very humbled to sit beside these two eminent diplomats in the name of Jenny Bonny Jenkins and Ambassador Christophe. People who have mentored me quite a lot in this issue of CBRN risk mitigation. Thank you for sharing the podium with me. Before I go to the pet subject of mine of the Kenyan program I'd be quite happy to correct something. This evening I've been referred very much to as Dr. Aligakweli. I'm about to be there but before I'm there I wouldn't like somebody to put that doctor first. I'll be there. I'm very sure when I'm back at this institute possibly I'll be there. Thank you. Christophe is a good friend of mine and he always likes using that title and I think it's because of the confidence he's developed in me as an individual and as a chemist that he always refers to me. Back to the chemical safety and security program which we are calling it the Kenya program. Kenya is located in the eastern part of South Sudan. People don't know exactly where Kenya is located and somebody at one time was telling me that Kenya is the capital city of South Africa but Kenya is a country which is located at the eastern part of the continent and it borders Uganda to the west the Indian Ocean to the east and to the southeast Tanzania and on the northern part we have South Sudan, Ethiopia and then we have on the eastern a very long border bordering Somalia. Now the reason why Kenya felt that there is need for it to have a program on chemical safety and security started quite some time when we had our ambassadors who are the permanent representatives of the OPCW who love it very strongly and they need to have a program for African countries a program that they will feel that it attracts a lot of interest from their leadership because it directly benefits the interest of those countries and for Kenya the issue of chemical safety and security was paramount for very good reasons the first reason is that Kenya provides the largest corridor for transiting goods into the eastern part of Africa it has the largest port in that side second to Daban and all the countries in the hinterland import and export their goods through the port of Mombasa which is the second biggest city in Kenya now that corridor brings through a lot of CBRN bulk products and if not very well managed it can pose a dangerous scenario not only to Kenya but even to shippers who are bringing goods into the country and the business entity the second reason was that Kenya for the past the chemical industries in the country have increased tremendously and not just Kenya alone but in the region and with the increase of these industries which are handling chemicals and other CBRN materials there was need to bring order and also to have preventive measures just in case the awkward thing would happen is simply falling into the wrong hands and being misused against the population in the country or in the region the third reason was that Kenya realized that the legislative framework which was controlling and managing chemicals in the country were not strong enough to deter or to ensure that this proper management of CBRN materials in the country and possibly punitive measures can be put into place for all those who mishandle or misuse CBRN materials including chemicals the last one is that Kenya has been struggling quite a lot with issue of terrorism Kenya shares a border with Somalia which has never had a government since 1992 currently there is a government which Kenya has participated with other countries in the region to make sure that there is a legitimate government in Somalia but the 700 plus kilometers that Kenya shares with Somalia has led to a lot of cross-border activities where some of these illicit trafficking of CBRN materials has taken root this also necessitated the Kenya defense forces to move into Somalia so that it can safeguard its interest and the border now because of these four key reasons that have put forward Kenya felt that there is need for it to secure and ensure that there is safety for all CBRN materials which are crisscrossing the country either by importation or exportation we have some of our neighbors like the Democratic Republic of Congo which produces a lot of chemicals raw materials for export and they all cross Kenya to the state of Mombasa for export I would like to say that there is no country or no industry which alone can fight terrorism and Kenya just like any other country needs the rest of the world to join hands with it so that it can manage especially these areas where CBRN materials are involved before the year 1998 Kenya was a very tranquil country we never knew or had any cases of terrorist activities but sometime in July, August 28 of 1998 Kenya woke up to a terrible bomb blast which to that we call it bomb blast and the president of this country the other day when I was here President Obama was laying a wreath at the bomb blast for all those who lost their lives during that day over 200 people died in that incident and over 5000 were maimed that changed the way Kenyans now looked at the way chemicals are to be handled 500 kilograms of Trinotro toluene were used in that bomb blast and the target was the American Embassy which was just next door and a number of Americans also perished in that I think from very right around 10 to 12 now because of that that was quite a challenge for Kenya and along the years a lot of things happened and there were a lot of lobbying for the purposes of having a program for Africa luckily this program started in Kenya and I want to pay a lot of tribute to our colleagues in Poland the International Center for Chemical Safety and Security who have worked with us we have sat in these meetings in our embassy in the Hague to discuss and deliberate on the way forward on how Kenya was going to enact and implement this program of chemical safety and security that apart Kenya is still having a lot of challenges because it continues to struggle with measures of effective prevention of cross-border movement of chemicals and related substances the border with Somalia has posed a very big challenge to the government of Kenya and to that I would say it has costed a lot of lives because as you read recently Kenya was again targeted twice in fact and the last one was an institution in the country which was targeted and around 147 students of a university lost their lives the potential gaps that Kenya faces as a country in planning, analysis resource mobilization and institutional coordination so that we can build a coherent approach towards this cross movement of chemicals remains a challenge to Kenya these gaps together with the International Center for Chemical Safety and Security which is the international coordinator for the Kenya program we did a feasibility study that came up with a lot of information on the gaps and what should be done to ensure that the country can plug in these gaps which have been identified some of these gaps include but are not limited to legislation Kenya is a signatory of it has signed and ratified most of the international conventions but to date a number of those conventions are yet to be domesticated by legislation I'm happy to report that we are currently working with some of the international partners to develop legislations for purposes of plugging some of those holes one of the areas that Kenya is working very strongly with the international partners is the area of development of Strategic Trade Management Act this is a program which is implemented together with the American Exbis program and we have moved a lot further we have a draft in place and we are looking forward to drafting a bill which will be presented in the parliament for purposes of enacting a legislation for controlling strategic chemicals and this includes a lot of the CBRN controlled chemicals over the years there are many international programs that have been developed to strengthen African nations including Kenya especially in the areas of security and their potential to respond to threat of terrorism and to increase their capacity to deal with toxic chemicals and worse in a safe and secure manner at the same time for majority of African nations and this one Kenya is included of course a significant challenge has emerged of how to integrate their assistance and related capacity building activities into a coherent national potential this is the potential to create on one side effective mechanisms and tools in the peaceful uses of chemistry including chemical safety and security and on the other side an urgent need to build synergies between national activities and develop them into coherent programs in the areas of chemical safety and security I want to stress one importance and the relevance of the chemical safety and security for Kenya on the perspective of development disarmament non-proliferation and efforts against terrorism the active stance in the area of chemical safety and security is very important to ensure increase of national capacity in prevention and preparedness to respond against misuse of toxic chemicals Kenya has received its share of misuse of toxic chemicals late last year the country was hit in downtown Nairobi by an improvised explosive device which was made from the ammonium nitrate and I was very impressed when one of the presenters here touched on the control of ammonium nitrate in this country the chemical safety and security program that we are putting in place with our counterparts the IWCWS are going to look forward to having legislations for the purposes of controlling materials which are very much in the Kenyan market and one of them is ammonium nitrate. Kenya is a country which is largely agricultural and ammonium nitrate is a very common constituent of the fertilizer used in our country but I would tell you that currently there are no legislative measures nor controls for the purposes of managing ammonium nitrate and that it's not something which is far-fetched to go to some of the very agricultural areas in Kenya and see ammonium nitrate being stored without any security at all even the supply chain areas they don't have inventories so that they can monitor on who is acquiring some of these materials which are of dual use ammonium nitrate in Kenya can be acquired by any person for any purpose and tracking who has acquired what is very difficult the Kenyan program is going to look into areas where audit trail and monitoring of these dual use chemicals will be one of its main objective the Kenyan program on chemical safety and security has been there for the last two years and it tries a lot to respond to these challenges that I have put forward it is an important project to the Kenyan population and the Kenyan government and it has the support of the Kenyan government and we are preparing to have a forum which has been approved by our cabinet secretary in the minister of health so that we can discuss with the key stakeholders in the country on areas of interest on how we can entrench matters of chemical safety and security in the country we are also trying to look at ways of promoting regional and international security so that we can support the national implementation of the chemical weapons convention and also the implementation of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 this program actually was preceded by a deep analysis on baseline study on the current activities, plans procedures which are already in place in Kenya on preventing and responding to attacks involving CBRN materials the Kenyan and international stakeholders in collaboration of course with the International Center for Chemical Safety and Security in Warsaw have examined the feasibility study of the Kenyan program and the existing emergency response capabilities of the country Kenya including the legal frameworks standard operation procedures practices and important procedures concerning chemicals in Kenya the study confirmed that there is need to improve border controls over the transit of toxic chemicals and related materials there is urgent need to improve the Kenyan national capacities in the area of prevention preparedness and response to possible terrorist attacks with chemical biological, radiological and nuclear weapons the leading objective of the Kenyan stakeholders within the Kenyan program is to create an effective safety and security system for transit and transportation of toxic chemicals this is the first main thematic area of the implementation of the Kenya safety and chemical safety and security program we have had some trainings that we have undertaken at the Mombasa based Kenya school of revenue and administration this is a world customs organization institution that trains regionally all custom officers within the region through this program, that is the Kenya program we have managed to train border security custom officers we have managed to train the mainstream police forces especially in areas of commodity identification training we have realized that our border security and also border the border security and the mainstream police officers they cannot or they are not able to identify positively what is brought into the country and the main method that is being used is using the HS code and we are looking to ways of entrenching cross referencing systems so that they can be able to positively identify some of these materials which are coming into the country the impact of the Kenyan program activities goes beyond the expected reduction of illegal cross border movement of chemicals and related materials to Kenya it relates to security economy and environmental management a broad participation of the relevant Kenyan agencies and our international partners facilitates covering the terrorism threads in a broader CBRN spectrum threads associated with organized crime and as well as risks associated with industrial transportation accidents environmental accidents and incidents that may potentially threaten the lives of people in Kenya I also wish to stress that the work we have been doing with the international center for chemical safety and security has been very beneficial to Kenya the approach which is based on cooperation and which concentrates on operationalizing and the existing best practices and capacity building is well received and supported in the country it opens the opportunities for cooperation in security economic and development areas and also it actively support the preparations of oncoming global chemical safety which will be held in Poland in the year 2016 in that summit the African forum of chemical safety and security will be organized within the summit and it will offer practical avenue for enhancing chemical safety and security in our region and Africa at large let me finish by saying that the introduction of this program in my country and in Africa will be a process of national capacity building best practices information exchange cooperation among professionals from the government, industry, academia science, the civil organizations and we have just started this process and hope to achieve a final objective which will assist in mitigating threats to promote peaceful uses of chemistry economy and trade cooperation thank you very much Ali, thank you so much we are out of time for questions but I think we could probably take two if you have a burning question please identify yourself yes Deborah please make it very short one comment and one question earlier this month I'm Deborah Decker with the Stimson Center invited up to the UN Security Council to present on some ideas we had on 1540 including leveraging the private sector to help and we have a roster of lawyers who are willing to work pro bono to help countries so just want to put that out there and we're looking now we did it as a pilot last year and we're looking to institutionalize it and we're thinking so if you all engage with you separately on that but for questions ASTM is an international certification body for laboratory accreditation and this is how you know that what you're testing in a lab is correct have you looked into the possibility of using that type of standards development organization to provide a security function also and then using governments to say we're not going to buy chemicals and governments purchase a lot of chemicals themselves unless you are an accredited body that not only meets the ASTM certifications for being an accurate lab but also a secure lab interesting question do you want to take that first? your last question is very interesting and to some self-explanatory but what I try to explain we as the center take new regulations we believe that there is enough best practices and existing procedures which could be internationalized and operationalized therefore but with regard to laboratories and we strongly believe that laboratories should be under very strict controls especially development of new chemicals but again I would like to avoid entering into debate what type of what kind of controls is needed because we have also no much expertise with regard to laboratories I know that in the developing countries there is much need to introduce well established good practices Ali is that something that Kenya might consider in the for future? in my country we have established the pharmacy and poisons control act which tends to control the acquisition of laboratory chemicals but it happens that not all the laboratories some of them are not registered and that's the problem at times we are having in that when you have laboratories operating without clear approval from the board they are bound to infringe on some of the regulations there is express regulation to the extent that whoever is procuring any controlled item should also be having the end user certificates and all that but again you would find that enforcement the issue of enforcement comes into question when the enforcement is not 100% there are always areas which can be flouted and we are looking at developing the strategic management control board there is a board which will be in charge of ensuring that all control items there is an inventory of who is acquiring what for purposes of doing that audit control but still the problem of laboratories sincerely acquiring some of these items from unscrupulous dealers out there in Kenya is still there did you have anything you wanted to add to that? I think in your presentation you made the point that laboratories is one thing but it is all along the chain of custody including transportation storage sites we looked at this in terms of uranium how you look at security of uranium from the start to finish but I thought Deborah was going to ask a different question which had to do with incentives and you had mentioned that you wanted to create a global market for chemical security my question goes back to insurance practices and is there a link between insurance and not just chemical safety but chemical security is that something you are working on and can everything that Bonnie is doing to support or promote chemical security culture can you feed that back into that insurance link? Thank you for this question in Poland we work with the biggest Polish company the two Polish insurance companies the fact insurer on a special program which would engage facilities to audit through which they can insure they receive lower insurance this exactly I know that such program exists also among companies I realize that but we are now working exactly in such a very simple way we simply say go safer go cheaper that's very simple go safer go cheaper and this is linked to social responsibility of business insurance companies should not only get money for private insurance insurance companies begin to understand they are part of safety and security system therefore I am very proud working at the centers we are pioneering all national program we would like to present this program worldwide at the summit we would introduce several new programs please join us you would see what we would introduce there exactly in such a way that insurance companies begin to understand that by auditing chemical plant through experts they can improve the safety security you know we have here Dr Andrzej Kozak from our Warsaw office and he can say that he has examples of few dollars leak leakage you know led to millions of losses therefore we believe again strongly that this is linked to insurance from very passive way that only get money for insurance to proactive way assisting chemical plant or chemical activity to get safer to get more security to go cheaper thank you Bonnie I think the important word that you said was incentives and I am not an expert on insurance company but I think the common ideal that we are talking about is incentives to want to practice chemical safety and security and whether that incentive is because of insurance or because it is a real understanding through security culture that it makes sense to do it and it is worth to do it we need to create that incentive a lot of its education and we understand that we have challenges when it comes to small and medium companies because as was said earlier a lot of times it is the bottom line and it costs to do this we talked a lot to Dow but of course Dow is large it is a large company but they do a lot in terms of security and we are talking to them about how do we try to promote incentives and small and medium companies to want to do this if there is ways to help reduce costs somehow that would be helpful but a lot of its education, culture helping them to understand and getting the government involved I think you talked a lot about how the Kenyan government is getting more and more involved in the chemical security and safety issue and I think that when you have the government involved to develop regulations I think the more you can do that the more you have some top down you still need the government involved and you can have that involved and you can start doing more things that you are seeing DHS is trying to do here but you don't always have that in some countries so its incentives its getting countries involved governments involved as future Dr. Gokwally has said but the bottom line is they have to understand why its important this is why you should do it this is the incentive to do it governments however you do it you have to understand why its important to be involved in this Ali do you have any comments on that Kenya we managed to get the political goodwill from the government in that our committee, the national committee which I coordinate on CBRN we managed to develop a cabinet memorandum which we pushed through government so that it can be fully involved and support the activities of the CBRN and chemical safety and security and Ali in March this year the cabinet did approve the establishment of the national committee and the CBRN reference centre so that it can be championing and spearheading the issues of chemical CBRN safety and security so as ambassador is putting it the government is fully involved it brings a lot of controls and even other parties can be reined in to ensure that they do the right things thank you I would like to invite our panels if you have anything else to add any urgent message for our audience here I have a message I believe that with chemical safety and security we should go global and this is the only way to meet threats we need to meet the toxic chemicals which is becoming a real threat and if you see the recent cases like Syria like attack in France like situation in Ukraine when chemical plants are abandoned or even some place attack you see the scale of threats therefore we believe that our vision to go non-political to modernize the methodology and to go global is the right way and I'm very thankful when I'm coming to the United States when I see such overwhelming support from the industry, from government from NGOs that we built here really truly multilateral and truly multi stakeholder approach therefore again I thank you very much for giving us opportunity to promote in this global and I know that you also were webcasts and I hope that this message will be also sent to well by community thank you thank you, Bunny I guess my final remark would be that there are activities going on I think what I tried to outline in my slides is the different entities and different parts of government, international organizations NGOs, industry individuals who are in this space and trying to promote this issue and developing a coordinated process both through the global partnership through this Berlin group we established through these kind of meetings we talked about developing an international grouping of folks, we already have quite a few right now in different entities who are focusing on this issue so it's a growing area, I mean DHS talked about how the work that they're doing in chemical security is still relatively new it's still a new area of chemical security in many ways and so I think we should continue to focus on this globally as you said and try to promote the importance of chemical security worldwide thank you and Ali, any final comments? that's good enough well one thing this panel has convinced me of is that we needed more than an hour to talk about this topic so I hope that we will reconvene at some point in the future and give the set of topics the time that it's due but please now join me in thanking our panelists