ii. OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE

 

General

The overall objective of this Document is to assist industrial enterprises, public authorities, and communities in the vicinity of hazardous installations to establish and implement SPI Programmes. This should help the three stakeholder groups to assess their performance in the context of chemical accident prevention, preparedness and response. Specifically, it gives these stakeholders tools with which they can design their own SPI Programme by identifying key elements (targets, activities indicators, and outcome indicators).

This guidance should be used on a voluntary basis, only to the extent appropriate, and only when adapted to particular circumstances.

The OECD Working Group on Chemical Accidents decided to prepare this Document, based on shared experience and insights on safety performance indicators. This should help to improve the ability of interested enterprises, public authorities and community organisations to measure whether the many steps taken to try to reduce the likelihood of accidents, and improve preparedness and response capabilities, truly lead to safer communities and less risk to human health and the environment.

The ultimate measure of performance is the reduction in the number of chemical accidents or near misses that occur. However, significant accidents/near misses are relatively rare events that have a wide range of possible impacts, and can be caused by a complex combination of technical, organisational, and human failings. Therefore, simply measuring accidents/near misses does not provide sufficient information about what actions are successful in terms of improving levels of chemical safety. Furthermore, there is no way to measure the accidents that did not occur as a result of actions taken to improve safety. Therefore, this Document was designed to help enterprises/organisations develop alternative means to measure performance.

The Working Group developed this Guidance Document in order to provide a tool to be used by stakeholders, to the extent appropriate, when establishing Programmes to:

• determine how successful they have been in developing and implementing appropriate requirements (external and internal), policies and procedures designed to reduce the likelihood of accidents and improve preparedness and response capabilities (including, for example, the OECD Guiding Principles for Chemical Accident Prevention, Preparedness and Response); and
  
  
• assess whether actions taken to implement these requirements, policies and guidance truly lead to continuously improving levels of safety over time.

This Document does not define a precise methodology; rather it provides suggestions of how to develop SPI Programmes, along with lists of the elements that could be used in such Programmes, based on the collective experience of experts in this field.

The guidance was developed to be comprehensive, recognising that not all the elements of the guidance are applicable in all circumstances; in fact, it is expected all the provisions would not be applicable in all situations. For example, a major producer of chemicals might be interested in the bulk of the elements contained herein and may, in fact, conclude that additional elements should be developed in light of its circumstances. A user of limited quantities of chemicals may find that only a small number of elements are relevant.