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A pan-Arctic view of emergency response Arctic Council working group is coordinating international efforts to prevent and respond to oil spills and other catastrophes ALAN BAILEY Petroleum News
For several years the Arctic Council, the intergovernmental forum for the Arctic region, has been paying close attention to achieving international cooperation over emergency and oil spill preparedness and response in the Arctic region. On Feb. 6, during the Alaska Forum on the Environment, Nils Andreassen, director of Alaska’s Institute of the North, presented an overview of the current status of Arctic Council initiatives in this arena, and what these initiatives mean for Alaska.
Eight Arctic nations The council has as its members the eight Arctic nations, while six indigenous groups from across the region are permanent participants. A number of other countries enjoy observer status in the council. The United States currently chairs the council, although Finland will be taking over the chairmanship in May. The council does not make policy decisions for its members. Nor does it make investment decisions for the Arctic. Instead, the organization acts as a forum for international coordination, establishing best practices and disseminating information.
Andreassen explained that in the area of emergency preparedness and response the council has departed somewhat from its normal mode of operation by acting as the conduit for negotiating international agreements, with those agreements subsequently being signed outside the council by the individual Arctic nations. In 2011 came an agreement for international cooperation in aeronautical and maritime search and rescue in the Arctic; 2013 saw an agreement for cooperation over marine oil pollution preparedness and response; and in 2015 the Arctic nations signed a plan for cooperation in the prevention of oil pollution from petroleum and maritime activities in marine areas of the Arctic, Andreassen said.
The EPPR group A working group within the council, the Emergency Prevention Preparedness and Response, or EPPR group, has responsibility for implementing the three agreements.
In terms of search and rescue, the working group assembled a team of experts, led by Norway. This team has established a lessons learned library on the EPPR website and is working on a mechanism for sharing search-and-rescue exercise announcements. Work is being carried out in collaboration with the recently formed international Arctic Coast Guard Forum, Andreassen commented.
Through joint exercises and training, the EPPR has been able to strengthen the cooperation, coordination and mutual assistance among the Arctic nations for oil spill preparedness and response. It has proved possible to develop operational guidelines, and to designate protocols for notifications and requests for assistance, Andreassen said. There is a process whereby individual nations evaluate their abilities to contribute assistance, with all of the nations in the council then jointly figuring out how to contribute to each other’s expertise.
Major drill As part of this continuing work, in 2016 the EPPR group organized a major international oil spill tabletop drill. The U.S. Coast Guard led the exercise, while Norway provided the spill scenario and Canada hosted the exercise in Montreal. Drill evaluators came from Canada and Finland. Final reports on the exercise will go to senior Arctic Council officials at their next meeting, in March in Juneau.
Currently the EPPR group is forming a marine environmental response expert group, to implement recommendations. And Finland is planning an exercise in 2018 to test resource deployment.
The EPPR group is also conducting a number of other projects, including a review of international standards for the offshore petroleum and maritime industries; the development by the United States of a database of Arctic spill response assets; and an update of the field guide for oil spill response in Arctic waters, Andreassen said.
Andreassen commented that various Alaska officials have been involved in the EPPR work, so that local Alaska perspectives are being included in the results. Essentially, while the Arctic Council group assembles information and facilitates international guidelines, the implementation of spill prevention and preparedness policies and arrangements lies within the jurisdictions of individual nations and territories.
Community response project One of the EPPR projects, a project to investigate oil spill preparedness in small Arctic communities, actually has the Institute of the North as its principal investigator. The Aleut International Association in cooperation with Norway originally promoted this project and, following a scoping session two years ago, the project has been moving forward with an objective of seeking greater local community awareness and preparedness with respect to oil spill risks. The idea is also to give national governments an opportunity to address misconceptions or lack of awareness in communities, and to identify any gaps in appropriate spill preparedness.
The project team is currently collecting questionnaires that it circulated to about 350 communities across the eight Arctic nations, with each community having less than 15,000 residents and each being located at a significant distance from any spill response center, Andreassen said. The survey assesses scores for a community in five areas: spill response planning, training, risks, impacts and resources. Scores in these areas are combined to form an overall score for a community’s spill response preparedness, taking into account the amount of oil spill risk to which the community is actually exposed. The idea is to encourage a community-led discussion of what preparedness looks like, Andreassen commented.
So far the project team has received some 50 responses, mostly from Alaska communities. The results will eventually be loaded into a database for presentation at the next Arctic Council ministerial meeting. However, to date, responses have shown that about 50 percent of the communities are moderately prepared, 20 percent are well prepared and 27 percent are not prepared. Results from different countries appear similar, despite significant differences in spill response systems.
There do appear, in general, to be plenty of resources available to help communities in their spill contingency efforts, Andreassen said. However, part of the objective is to identify gaps between what Arctic states think is in place for spill response and what the communities themselves feel about the situation.
The next step will be to translate the review of the community spill response status into tools that can assist the communities, Andreassen said. In doing this, the EPPR group will need to recognize that communities will need some sense of what is in it for them, when it comes to project results, he commented.
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