Environmental Compliance Webinar 12/14/15 Page 1 of 10
Webinar Transcript
Environmental Compliance for Feed the Future Research Programs
December 14, 2015
Moderator: Julie MacCartee, Knowledge Management Specialist, USAID/BFS
Speaker: Bill Thomas, Bureau Environmental Officer, USAID/BFS
Moderator: Good afternoon, everyone. On behalf of the USAID Bureau for Food Security, I would like to welcome you to a special training webinar on environmental compliance. My name is Julie MacCartee and I'm a Knowledge Management Specialist with the Bureau for Food Security and I'll be facilitating today, along with my colleague, Zachary Baquet, a Knowledge Management Adviserwith the Bureau for Food Security.
I would like to go ahead and introduce our speaker today, Bill Thomas, who is our Bureau Environmental Officer here in the USAID Bureau for Food Security and our trainer for today. Bill, fairly recently, transferred tothe Bureau for Food Security from USDA in March 2015 after 13 years as a program leader for the Sustainable Systems and Communities Program at the National Agricultural Library and before that, he was an Environmental Protection Specialist at EPA for nine years. So he has great breadth and depth of experience in environmental compliance and environmental issues, so we're excited to have him today to take on this training. So I'm gonna go ahead and pass the mic over to Bill and we'll get started.
Speaker: Good afternoon, everyone and I'm happy to be here, I'm glad you're all here and today we're gonna be talking about environmental compliance at USAID, but specifically at the Bureau for Food Security and this is basic information and the whole purpose of this is to ensure everybody is on the same page. Before we go any farther, we do have a knowledge check. I know this is difficult, I want y'all to choose the best answer, serious or not, depending on the kind of mood that you're in. Well, got that chicken and fried rice, that's good. Okay, so it turns out, sadly, it isn't the Campaign for Finance Reform Bill by the congressional gang of 216, but you are correct, 22CFR216 is the awesome Code of Federal Regulations, Title 22, part 216 and we're gonna be going into great depths of this fascinating and most interesting piece of guidance, regulatory guidance.
So moving forward here, as many of you may recall and if you weren't around at this time, environmental awareness actually did go viral back in the 1960s, driven primarily by this book, Silent Spring, written by Rachel Carson who lived in the Washington, D.C. area and it was a book about pesticides and the overuse of pesticides. This kind of spurred greater awareness across America of environmental issues and what came from that was a demand on Congress and the government to do more about environmental issues. A number of laws were passed back in 1960s, early 70s, but probably the most important one was the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, and it continues to guide government environmental policy today and President Nixon did sign NEPA back in 1970 but that's not all he did, of course. So what NEPA does is it requires all federal agencies to look at the environmental impact of federal programs before they start and this is a process that's transparent and it's open to the public and this had never happened before so now all the federal agencies were required to look at their programs, their policies, whatever kind of activities they were engaging in and before they started, take a look and see what kind of environmental issues could come from that.
Unfortunately, the United States Agency for International Development did not do that and in 1975, USAID gave Pakistan technical grade pesticide, Malathion, without any kind of training, without any kind of guidance or personal protection equipment and it ended up being misused, accident during application, five people died and hundreds were sickened. Because of that, there was a group of U.S. environmental groups that came together and sued USAID to implement NEPA and what happened was that USAID was forced to comply with NEPA and ended up settling out of court with these environmental groups. Finally, after five years, in 1980, USAID published Title 22, Code of Federal Regulations, part 216, which we call Reg 216 or 22CFR216 and these are now the environmental compliance procedures here at AID and we may have another poll. Okay, so just a little quick review, make sure everybody's paying attention, it's actually number one, of course. No, actually, it's sadly the last one but Elvis Presley could have had some impact on that. Thank you.
So there are other relevant environmental legislation that affects AID but our focus today is 22CFR216 and let's take a closer look at it. As with all NEPA implementations, Reg 216 requires USAID to look carefully at potential environmental impacts from its projects, from its programs, from its activities. Look carefully at the environment of where that project's gonna take place and then work with a host country in an environmental capacity strengthening and the key thing, here is this all has to be done before funds are committed to the project, before the project starts. So going quickly through what's inside of Reg 216, when the project is looked at, a determination is made, some activities have no impact on the environment and those are given a categorical exclusion and we'll talk more about that in just a bit. An initial environmental assessment is done to take a look and see, really, what kind of impact the project or activity may have. If it looks like it's no significant impacts or the impacts can be mitigated, it's a negative determination and the activity can commence. Significant impacts, and we'll get deeply into this, require to get a positive determination which requires an environmental assessment. So we're gonna move in, talk about all of these. You don't have to memorize this slide.
So the IEE is key that USAID in key and BFS to really take an initial look and see what the possible environmental impacts are of a project. So the first look at potential environmental impact, it's drafted, oftentimes by the COR working with an activity team and then once it's signed by myself, the BEO, it becomes a legally binding document. Whatever conditions are in that document are required by the implementing partners. Again, it has to be done before the project can start. It's key that the implementing partners have a copy of this so that they can develop and EMMP and we'll be talking about environmental mitigation and monitoring plants more in a little bit. So we'll move forward here. Okay a couple questions have come up and we'll go back to this.
Right so, 22CFR216, if you remembered nothing else from today, although you'll probably remember a whole lot more is the USAID Environmental Compliance Guidance and it does require that we consider environmental consequences before proceeding and it is not, shockingly, USAID's version of a full environmental impact assessment, that is considered to be an environmental assessment. The IEE is done pretty quickly to give an overview of what could come about from the project. So I see a few answers are changing there, which is fine. Okay, good. So Reg 216 has a number of determinations. As I said earlier, if there's no significant adverse environmental impact, it's a categorical exclusion. If there's specified mitigation and monitoring with those, there's no significant environmental impacts, it's considered a negative determination with conditions. Those conditions are spelled out in the IEEE that will then go into the EMMP and the project can move forward. Significant environmental impacts, positive determination, pretty rare. I have yet to see one, but I've only been here for about nine months. The deferral is not recommended. It's a whole lot better to do an amendment to an IEEE rather than a deferral and the exemption is very, very rare.
What I see mostly, so far, are categorical exclusions and a negative determination with conditions. Looking closely at the categorical exclusion, there's a number of things listed in the yellow box that just don't have a negative environmental impact. Education, technical assistance or technical programs, doing documents or transferring documents and analysis of study, some type of a research workshop or academic workshop or a meeting, do not have negative environmental impacts in general. Nutrition, health, family planning, we don't really do that much in BFS, we do some but rarely is there anything where medical waste is generated. If that's the case, then that ends up being a positive determination. In the black box, no categorical exclusions are possible when an activity involves pesticides and we'll get more into pesticides a little bit further in this presentation but I'll keep that in mind.
So there's a number of things that you may do in your programs that are categorical exclusions. If you're having a meeting, if you're doing an analysis or a study, those are categorical exclusions and once that's determined then nothing else needs to be done. Negative determination with conditions, that means that the proposed action could have minor environmental impacts but these can be mitigated and controlled. Really, this applies only to small scale projects, ag research, doing some renovation refurbishment of a lab, for example, some health projects, again, not impacting the environment, some small scale water or sanitation or road improvements. If it's a positive determination, you'll know because these actions usually do have a significant effect on the environment. We really don't get into these too much in BFS. Any kind of large scale river basin development or irrigation schemes, land leveling, doing large scale drainage, mechanization, developing new lands will definitely bring about an environmental assessment. Any kind of resettlement, no matter how small, any kind of road building into an area that's never had roads before and of course power industrial building large-scale water sewage.
If there's logging of _____ my team kicks in, as well as anything _____ problems in national parks with exotic plants or animals. So a negative determination with conditions require the implementers, the implementing partners to incorporate whatever kind of requirements come out of IEE into the budget and wok plan and those are usually manifested into an environmental mitigation and monitoring plant. Then the next thing is to make sure that the EMMPs are adequate, suitable and are actually done out in the field and then to report back on these. Positive determination, again, pretty rare with BFS projects but that environmental assessment must be done before the project can be started and it's gotta be worked into the budget and work plans. This is something that I would work directly with you on and it would have to be cleared by me before the project can proceed.
So pesticides. Because of the beginnings of 22CFR216, pesticides are a big part of it. Again, AID wants to make sure that if pesticides are used in a project, they're properly selected and they're safely used. Key part of this. And why care about pesticides? Again, remember the origins of22CFR216, we wanna make sure that if U.S dollars are spent, the pesticides are used correctly. We don't contribute to resistance and we certainly don't cause any type of health problems, poisoning, chronic sickness, birth defects, anything else that stems from our use of pesticides. So we wanna be very careful with that. Not to say you can't use them but again, they need to be used very carefully and used in a situation that is integrated pest management to make sure that pesticides are only used when needed, not as a scheduled activity but when the pest populations are high enough and that particular pesticide is warranted. As we'll get into a little bit further down in this presentation, it's critical to look at non-pesticide management options or whatever the least toxic option may be.
Says the USAID policy, that IPM framework be done for every activity, whether it be agriculture or health or anything else that uses pesticides. So this is a really important part of this. When USAID funds are used to purchase pesticides, that is considered to be pesticide procurement or if there's any type of payments that are going into pesticides being used by farmers, even credit use facilitating the sale, U.S. funds are used to handle or transport or store, U.S. funds are used to mix, load or apply or dispose or U.S. funds are used to buy fuel to transport the pesticides. And this is a key one here; this is not a categorical exclusion even though it is for other things, technical assistance, when it's specifically for pesticide training it is considered pesticide use. Okay, do we have another poll? Exciting, okay. Okay, the PERSUAP. Pesticide Evaluation Report and Safer Use Action Plan. Even though some of those are exciting and it was very hard to find an acronym for PERSUAP other than the Pesticide Evaluation Report and Safer Use Action Plan.
So we'll move forward now into the strange and exotic land of the PERSUAP, which again, Pesticide Evaluation Report and Safer Use Action Plan, two parts of it. One is the pesticide evaluation report which directly responds to22CFR216, Pesticide Procedures Requirement. The second part of the PERSUAP is safer use action plan which identifies actions from mitigating, monitoring and complying with host country procedures. We're gonna get more deeply into these. So these are directly from the Reg 216 so whenever pesticides are going to be used, it's critical to know what the U.S. EPA status of the recommended pesticide is. If it's not registered in the U.S., then we cannot use U.S. funds to provide it to another country even though it may be registered there but not here. So it's gotta be actively registered here in the U.S. Part of this is to really understand the basis for selection for pesticide.