ensure not only leadership in stewardship of the arctic environment, but also to find ways to enhance international cooperation and through the arctic council we have demonstrated an ability to the cooperate internationally on science and technology and that really forms the core of the secretary's request. it's a question about what the science and technologies needed to ensure the prudent development of oil and gas resources and in particular what could the department of energy do to further advance science and technology. one of the key aspects of the recommendations that you'll hear about today is a recognition that in order to develop and realize the promise of oil and gas resources in the alaskan arctic that it will be vital to secure the public confidence that those resources can be developed in a responsible manner.

in order to ensure that public confidence we're going to have to make sure that we are conducting science in demonstrating technologies in transparent manners. so that means in some sort of public manner, whether it's through the work of the national labs. we have the work of national labs across the country that are part of the department of energy. whether it's through public, private partnerships and many of which are referenced and surveyed in the study or through academic work, but in order for policymakers to rely on science and technology demonstration in policy making, that work is going to have to be done in a transparent manner that the public can have confidence in. i think you will see quite a few of the recommendations in the study have that in mind and we very much look forward in identifying ways that the department of energy can be part of that continued resource and that demonstration. the -- many will ask why the arctic, why now outside of this leadership imperative when we

have such a tremendous abundance of domestic oil and gas in the lower 48, and the simple answer to that question is that we make -- we should be making decisions at a policy level that have our children in mind. the office that i have the pleasure and the privilege of managing right now the initial work was done in the marcellus in 1978 and horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing and the office spent about $130 million much of it in partnership with george mitchell and as many of you know, perfected it and demonstrated in the barnet and north texas, and that knowledge has been applied to a very prolific resource that is found in oil and has generated an

incredible abundance of domestic supply. the reason that we need to be thinking about the arctic now is because it will take us a good decade of exploration in proving up this resource to get into the place where we are at a significant level of commercial production. so the work we did in 1978 to provide for the domestic supplies that we have now, that's where we need to be in the arctic and this is about the children in securing that energy security and that's the why now and why the arctic. and i encourage you all to take a look at the report that carol's going to share here in a bit. i think it's a very valuable contribution to our understanding of the oil and gas resource as well as the environment in which it will be developed and how we ensure it's done in eye prudent manner. thank you for being here today. >> thank you so much. i don't mean to be such an ogre as far as time and short presentations and lots of questions are always the best. carol, over to you.

walk us through the highlights of the petroleum council's work. good morning, and thank you so very much for the invitation to be here to talk about the arctic and to talk about the national petroleum council study. i would offer for you three key takeaways that i'm going to focus on in the next five to seven minutes and then i would be pleased to take your questions. the first takeaway is the very collaborative process that was mentioned. paula mentioned it briefly. it may be tempting because of the name of the organization under which this study was done to dismiss it as an industry position piece and an advocacy document. it is not that, and i hope to demonstrate that to you directly in the next few moments. the second key take away is that the u.s. arctic potential is

significant material in the future as paula so ably articulated to you in her comments about the children and the technology to access, to explore for and develop that u.s. offshore arctic potential exists today based on technology that's been developed and proven in other jurisdictions and then finally the key take away is what happens next and i'll close with some of the more important recommendations in the report from a technical perspective, and i'm happy to wear the cloak that heather has given me on the technical guru on the panel and i'll focus on those and then leave drew pierce to talk about some of the other aspects that we discussed with the arctic council and our thoughts on the most appropriate actions to

undertake as the u.s. transfers and assume the chairmanship of the arctic council. with that i'll make a couple of comments with regard to the team that we assembled and the collaborative process. in the slide, you can see you have 266 participants from over 105 organizations. 43% from the oil and gas industry and 30% from the federal government and here in washington and also the state of alaska and government representatives and 12% from academic institutions, not surprising given the research and technology. we saw the need to reach out to those institutions that were directly involved in research in the arctic and ice and logistics and topics which were relevant to our report. the remainder -- the remaining 15% roughly split between alaska native representation, consultants, think tanks and the environmental community.

we met, we received the secretary's request. a study committee was formed and we developed a work plan that looks kind of like the one shown on the right-hand side and tested that with the secretary of energy before we undertook our work. the result itself is split into three parts and the first part is prudent development and that includes a global perspective and global resource potential including the u.s. onshore, offshore with the focus on conventional gas and it includes interesting facts with regard to the oil industry's long history of experience in arctic and arctic like conditions and it includes policy, history in the u.s. and it compares and contrasts u.s. arctic policy with other nations.

we describe at a high level what exploration in the arctic might take and what some of the challenges and opportunities might be other than technology. that's part one. part two and three are the majority of the report. it's 550-plus page report and those are the research and technology sections. there is an engineering section that includes four chapters, with the exploration and development technology and the logistics and the very important topic of oil spill response and then the environmental section includes ecology and the human environment. these two teams assess the current state of technology and the current state of ongoing research, assessed gaps and selected opportunities for the current administration and the department of energy to pursue. those opportunities were prioritized and the most important ones highlighted in the executive summary for consideration. a very, very collaborative report. a broad and deep team that came

together to have conversations first, do analysis and then come to conclusions. we worked for more than a year. we did not start putting pen to paper on recommendations until the last two months of this study. the next topic is that i wanted you to take away is that the u.s. arctic potential is significant and the technology exists to explore for and develop it safely today and i'll develop that further in the next five minutes or so. there are seven key findings in the report, in the executive summary. you can see them listed and summarized on this page and the order is important. it was -- this is first and foremost, a technical report and the order follows a logical, technical order. in finding one we describe the size of the oil and gas resource potential and i'll tell you more about that in a subsequent slide. in finding two we explore the arctic ecological, physical and

human environment which we found was well understood after decades of research from many different institutions and organizations. in finding three, we explore the oil and gas industry's long history of successful operations in the arctic which has been enabled by continuing technology advances. more than a century of experience that starts with the very cold-water development in norman wells in canada and then moves forward to the cook inlet in the u.s. exploration programs in the u.s. and canadian seas in the '70s and '80s and moves into the development rain beginning in the rough 1990s through to the present day. in finding four, perhaps the most important in the study or one of the most important, most of the u.s. arctic conventional oil and gas potential can be developed using existed field proven technology. of course, we recognize the technical know how is not enough

in order to move forward the development must be economically viable as we discussed in finding five and we must also have public confidence that the opportunity can be pursued in a prudent manner as paula described earlier and as we describe in the report in finding six. we recognize that we're not there in the u.s. with the public confidence. we note in the report the shared responsibility between the oil and gas industry and the government in securing and maintaining this public confidence and then finally in finding seven we outline the substantial recent technology improvements in the area of oil spill prevention and oil spill response in ice. those technology improvements have not yet been fully accepted in the u.s. which opens up the opportunity for collaborative research in the public forum as paula discussed and we see those in the recommendations which i'll show to you shortly. briefly, on resource potential, we use the u.s. geological

survey's assessment and in the pie chart on the left you see the assessment and the global potential and global endowment in the arctic is 923 billion barrels of oil potential and as we move to the 4:00 position we see roughly one-third is in produced and reserves entirely in u.s. and russia. the 4:00 position starts the discovered and not yet developed and there are no development plans in the books for those resources and about 100 billion barrels and the majority look at that 51% or 426 billion barrels of undiscovered potential in the global arctic. the global arctic contains the world's largest accumulation of undiscovered oil and gas hydrocarbons. so splitting that potential, that global potential by country is shown on the right. you can see by inspection that

russia is by far the largest holder of that global potential, but look who is second. it's none other than the u.s. focusing on the oil potential we see the oil potential in russia and the u.s. is roughly equivalent and the u.s. has more oil potential than either canada or greenland other than norway. so this illustrates the significant resource potential in the global arctic and then in the u.s. we discuss in the report why to pursue the arctic now and paula covered that point. in the third bullet on the slide we talk about the national security and economic benefits associated with oil and gas development in the north and for those of you that were here this morning to hear senator murkowski's remarks on the

economic benefit of oil and gas development to local alaskans i don't think i can say it any better than she did, but for those of you that like numbers there's quite a lot of discussion in the report about the potential economic implications of an offshore development. i would encourage you to take a look at that. this particular display is -- illustrates the variability in arctic ice conditions around the world. there is not one arctic. in the first two columns in this table we describe arctic environment. by environment we describe of ice depth and water depth. in the first column you have a word description and in the second column we have the examples around the world where that environment is found. the third column is the technology implications on oil and gas development. you can think of these as technology tiers. tier one being the first rough -- rowan roughly the easiest, although easiest is a relative term in an area as remote as the arctic and tier 5 being the most difficult from a technology perspective.

you will note immediately that there are pictures in tiers 1, 2 and 3 and no pictures in tier 4 and 5 and that's because tiers 4 and 5 have not yet been proven, not yet, i always say. i'm in the research business and that's what we're working on now. the other item i would point out to you is the red text illustrates where the u.s. potential is located and the majority of the u.s. potential, 90% of undiscovered potential is assessed to be in the buford in less than 100 meters of water depth and you can see the photos in tier 3 you can see exploration technology which was demonstrated in the '70s in the canadian and u.s. overseas and they were in the 2000s and in the '90s and 2000s and finally

with regard to well control technology improvements, there's been significant improvement post the macondo tragedy and also by the regulators. this particular display we call the bow tie for obvious reasons. at the center of the bow is a loss of containment event and on the left hand side are all of the prevention technologies available to eliminate and reduce the risk of a well containment event occurring in the first place and usually these topics, oil spill prevention and oil spill response are separated and the prevention side is the engineering domain and the response side tends to be an environmental domain. in our report we brought those industry's objective and the objective of stakeholders to prevent them from taking place in the first place. i'll direct your attention to the picture of the sea bed emergency shut-in device. these are the new technologies that i mentioned that have been recently developed and we see

the need for additional collaborative research to validate these technologies which the industry views as proven and adopt them for full use in the u.s. finally, with regard to what comes next, i've highlighted as promised on this chart the key recommendations coming out of the report, the key technical recommendations. we have grouped the recommendations into three teams, environmental, stewardship, economic viability and government leadership and policy coordination. these themes are the three pillars, if you will, of what's necessary to move forward with the development. the first two listed are in the environmental stewardship theme and the first is that industry

and regulators should work together to analyze these new technologies for well control. the second speaks to oil spill response in ice and there is an industry collaborative research project that's been under way since 2012 that has been evaluating response technologies developed in temperate climates to see how they will perform in the arctic and we recommend that government agencies form that collaborative and there are eight international companies participating. in the area of economic viability we make two recommendations and the first is around extending the drilling season. the picture at the left illustrates the challenge, currently the exploration drilling season is conducted in the winter or in the summer, excuse me, when the water is open and ice-free. that's about 110 days. however, the current practice is to restrict the back end of that season from exploration drilling to reserve it for same-season relief well and that reduces the season to 79 days and in order to drill the exploration well

you need about 80 days to progress it if you have a dry hole. if you have a test to do you need more time. what it's requiring is two mobilizations for every single exploration well. what's possible with validating some of these technologies that i'm talking about that have been used and demonstrated in other jurisdictions and in the '70s and '80s in the u.s. is to double that season so it would make it possible to drill in a single season with a single mobilization cutting the cost of drilling almost in half and significantly reducing the risk. the second economic issue is lease terms and you can see from the picture that the u.s. is different from other nations in terms of the lease construct being a development-based system which requires more drilling in the primary lease term to secure lease for development. other nations have recognized this challenge. it's very difficult to progress the number of exploration wells

noted when you can only work two to three months out of the season during the summer months, and they've recognized this and they break the lease into a couple of bites and the next bite is an exploration lease where if you have the discovery, you go into the process of converting discovery license and then you're allowed more time with which to advance the development and these are key technical recommendations in the report and i would be pleased and look forward to your questions. thank you very much. heather? >> we have copies of the report and really tremendous amounts of information is in there and i encourage you to take it home and read it. may i turn to -- >> you have the keyboard, ma'am. thank you, our fancy technology is passing down the row. all right, ms. pierce, the floor is yours. i just have to figure it out. great. thank you very much.

thank you to csis and thank you to all of you for being here today. i'm going to talk about three things very briefly and the arctic research study and the alaskan's perspective which i bring to the table. paula made the comment that it's important that any movements forward in the arctic have the public's confidence, but what we alaskans brought to the table was for this study for it to have credence in alaska, it had to have alaskans' confidence and so lots of alaskans got to take part and i was very pleased with the outcome. i'm going to talk briefly about one of the recommendations related to the arctic council and the u.s. chairmanship, and i am going to talk about the arctic economic council which you heard the senator speak about earlier. so the senator sold you to old you to told you to

remember those 4 million people who live in the arctic and i was honored to serve on the coordinating subcommittee not only with heather and many people here in the room, but also with dozens of alaskans who worked on the coordinating sub committee and also on the different chapter teams. they brought their passion to the table. henry huntington of pugh, doctor and commissioner meyers and his staff now at alaska dnr, many, many scientists at the university of alaska, particularly in fairbank, but also throughout the state and we had a work shop in fairbanks where we brought in native leaders. we had tribal leaders and we had local government leaders and we had corporation and sea leaders and we had whalers and subsistence users and the person who made sure that we kept on the right track and remembered those people who live in the arctic each time we met was my friend richard glenn and just to

give you an idea of all of the different hats that the people, that those 4 million people who live in the arctic wear, not everyone wears these hats, but richard is the executive vice president for lands and minerals and arctic slope regional corporation and one of the largest of the encs and he's a geologist, he's a father and whaling crew co-captain and he's an eskimo dancer and a rock 'n' roll keyboardist and he's a member of the study coordinating subcommittee and he spoke to us a lot, but he talked a lot about balance, and so i put a quote here and i am going to read it to you. he said the study was all about balance and balance between conservation and resource development and balance between knowledge and western science and engineering. the arctic is our home. we aren't going anywhere. he talked to us many times as did some of the elders about the

fact that the upic have been adapting to changing climates, to changing migratory patterns and to the infusion of new culture and technology for thousands of years. they haven't left and they're not going to leave. another quote, if development comes, we want to share in the benefits while working to mitigate any negative impacts. do we get passionate about it? you bet we do and all of the alaskans who are at the table whether working at one of the chapters or at the work shop or at the coordinating subcommittee brought their passion to the table. we brought it back home to alaska time and time again and we insisted upon a focus on traditional knowledge. we insisted upon a focus on the benefits for alaska and i have to say the ladies to my left were extremely patient with all of the alaskans. so there is a recommendation in the executive summary in this

study. the secretary asked in his letter about d.o.e.'s role during the arctic council chairmanship and so in the policy leadership policy recommendations there is a recommendation and this is it. you heard the senator speak about the arctic council this morning, but a lot of people aren't familiar. it was created at the direction of ministers in the minister yal declaration, under the leadership of the canadian chair of arctic council. she represents the first time a

participant has been chair. the inaugural meeting was in september last year, and that place we all don't quite know how to pronounce. the purpose is to facilitate business to business activity and responsible economic development. there are 42 voting members. there's a four member executive committee and that will include one prominent participant. this is the first time in an international body like this that was developed certainly around the arctic council that the permanent participants are fully at the table with a vote. alaska is lucky and the united states, but particularly alaska is lucky because we have three business representatives who are from alaska. representing all alaskans.

but we also have permanent participant representatives. one from the inuit. and so the u.s., alaska, has eight of the 42 voting members, and that's the largest single delegation. on tuesday the state department held a virtual outreach form, and presented to many people, many alaskans in particular, a new slide show about what the agenda is, and asked for questions, and certainly the state department wants the input. but i just want to note that under economic development, the first bullet is harness the expertise and resources of the economic council, to inform the council's work to improve economic and living conditions

in the region. now i actually have some insider knowledge. i have reason to believe when the group gets to ottawa next thursday, where they're having their second face-to-face meeting that they will choose to adopt a rotating chairmanship, just like the arctic council has. i also have reason to believe that the u.s. will be the second chair after canada. the chair at the moment of the new arctic economic council. and i also have reason to believe that tara sweeney, who is the business rep for the inuit circumpolar conference of alaska, who sits on the executive committee presently, will be the chair during the u.s. chairmanship.

the alaskans have met monthly. they talk about what they hope that they can bring forward to the larger arctic economic council. but they're bringing a number of proposed themes to the table next week, and i suspect because these fit so closely into the terms of reference for the arctic economic council itself that these will be adopted. so the overreaching themes for the next two years, encouraging publish/private partnerships, predicting stable frameworks, facilitating knowledge and data exchange between industry and academia, establishing strong market connections between arctic states, and traditional indigenous knowledge, stewardship, and a focus on small businesses and indeed on indigenous owned businesses. the senator you heard say, she wants the aec to go on the road. i believe that certainly the alaskan members, the eight of

them, will be very willing to do so here in the united states. will encourage business reps from other states to do the same. just so you know, the aec alaska folks bring the same passion to the table that we had at the -- during the study. so we will be very well represented. thank you. >> thank you so much, and let me tell you we always encourage insider information. so thank you for that. that's terrific, and that really highlights what we're going to anticipate next week. just taking the moderator's prerogative for a moment, just sort of my very brief reflections in being part of this incredible process. my coconspirator, i'm sure he's here in the room, frank, senior vice president at csic and holds our schlessinger chair of energy, and said would you like to be part of this research study. i said sure. he goes, heather, it's a lot of work. i'm like, okay. no, heather, it's a lot of work.

i was unprepared for the extraordinary amount of work. the people, the numbers, the meetings, it was extraordinary. you talk about passion. but what is so interesting is we all came from it from a very different perspective. for me it was so helpful to understand the private sector, the technology, i mean, i could never understand the technology the two have an appreciation for it, and to have the private sector have an appreciation and quite frankly to be totally frightened, about the policy environment in which the decisions are being made. and so it was an incredible learning experience, and i think some great colleagues were formed, and i think we're going to continue this conversation well after this study. i have to say again, reflections for the peanut gallery. the department of energy requested this study. but in some ways, this runs into what senator murkowski mentioned. sometimes the biggest challenge

is us and the inner agency process. because a lot of the conversation is part of the study was really about the department of interior. the department of interior was in these processes and was very engaged, but they didn't request the study. this was about the department of energy trying to understand its emerging role in the arctic. but it was -- it was a part of the process that i think was very interesting. it was to see and to witness and have everyone experience it, as well as getting the critical voice from alaska. again, we in the washington policy communities get so focused on our inner agency fights and our regulation and who is doing what, and we've always been returned to what's important, and that's the people. and i was so grateful. again, for my two cents, i think the larger question this study raises, it doesn't come out, but this is my takeaway from it. does the united states want to develop the offshore arctic resources.

do we or don't we? that's not an easy question to answer. and there are a lot of questions about economic viability. there are a lot of questions about are we ready. do we have sufficient infrastructure, search and rescue oil and spill prevention capabilities, do we have what is necessary. and as we've all been watching shell's journey, some may argue it's an odyssey of their efforts to do this, we've learned a lot through that process. but increasingly we're understanding, and i'm so grateful you talked about the arctic economic council. when the state department first briefed their chairmanship agenda, i assure you it was not at the the top of the economic issue. they heard in stereo around the circumpolar arctic, that economic development had to be part of the conversation, and there was some reluctance. but i think we need to recognize they heard it. and they're responding.

and so this is important. these voices matter, and we all have a piece of the conversation, and it takes the 200 plus people that came around the table through the vehicle of the national petroleum council study to say we've got a lot of work to do. so again, sort of from the observation tower of this process, it was incredible. it was incredible amount of work. and i can't tell you, paul and carol had killed themselves the last 12 months, to shepherd this motley group and get to a really incredible product. so i want to thank you so much. so now i get to turn to some questions, and this is where i get to play tough questioner here. as much as you can share, sort of the challenge of the interagency process here. dewey has a strong role in this, but not the total role, and right before the study was completed, we had the department of interior propose some new guidelines, some new regulations, and that sort of

entered in at the end of it. what's your perspective on the inner agency dynamic and your cooperative relationship with the department interior as you work on these issues? >> thanks, heather. we have an incredibly robust, as many of you are aware, inner agency dialogue, but also an incredible amount of collaboration. particularly with the office of oil and gas at doe, and the department of interior, various agencies, for example, in the aftermath of the deep water horizon event. many of the learnings that have been taken up, have been developed in collaboration with our office, as well as the research partnership for secure energy america, which involves about 140 companies and technology firms. likewise, we have, as directed by the president's blueprint for secure energy future, which calls for an all of the above energy strategy, we have a multiagency strategy for

understanding and working to develop the science to mitigate the impacts of unconventional oil and natural gas production, and this is with our office and usgs and epa and like wise you usgs and epa and likewise you see the l recommendations that are pointed to doe. and this report really points back to that role for the arctic as well. in one way, the way i think about the work of our office, is we're the office of science for federal and state regulators. we were in alaska last week, and i can tell you state regulators in alaska are very much focused on these questions and understanding what the science says in an unbiased and neutral manner about this activity can proceed. and those are the same questions that our partners are asking at other federal agencies, and we're the office that they turned to understand what the center of the science understands. and it's a vital role that government research plays and providing policymakers with an unbiased view of science, technology, and its performance. so that we can move forward in

these areas. so there's a very robust collaboration between our office and other agencies, and the recommendations here provide us sort of a road map forwards on what we should be looking at next in the area of science and technology. >> carol, what surprised you the most about this study? you went into this, and i think, if i may tell my little tale out of school. i think carol was surprised at the world of washington policy sausage making. a canadian herself, she was looking at this going, why do you do that? well, why does that happen? i love that. because it was hard to explain why. but what took you by surprise the most about the study? >> oh my gosh. it's hard to pick one thing. i guess what i would say -- i mean, you hit on it, heather, we just learned -- those of us in the industry just learned a lot

about the history of our arctic policy and also about the challenges in integrating the many different -- the many different aspects of arctic policy that are important to all stakeholders. i would say when we came together to undertake this question, each of us probably came to the table with our own perspective of what was most perspective of what was mostly each of us from our own corners of the room, so to speak, were thinking of this, heather, pretty simply, and as we conducted the dialogue over those many months, the scope of the problem started small and got bigger, and then we tried to synthesize and bring it together in a meaningful way. and so, i mean, i just learn sod

much in terms of the importance of listening fully and not letting your own biases stop you from hearing what someone else was trying to say. i learned that the exxon mobile project management culture sometimes clashes with the very focused on schedule and execution. sometimes clashes with the fulsome debate, and question learn to tolerate the strengths each of us brought to the team. but what i would say is we started out the journey together with people saying hello, i'm paula from the department of energy and i'm caroline from exxon mobil and on the way we moved from being individuals representing you are respective respective o respective u respective t respective respective t respective respective

r respective interests and we became a team that was about trying to really understand the secretary's question and understand the broader context behind his question. so i'm very pleased with what we delivered. if i look back on what helped us be successful, others will judge if they think it was successful or not. two critical success factors, was one establishing a transparent schedule, which we agreed with the secretary early on. the second was the selection of the right team at the coordinating sub committee. leaders like are in the room with us today and sitting at this table with me. i'm just incredibly grateful for everyone's support and the opportunity. >> thanks so much, i'm going to ask you a question. i would have loved to ask senator murkowski, and we ran out of time. from the state perspective and your legislative career, the alaskan state economy has really been battered. on the one hand, we can celebrate low energy prices, boy, the budget has taken a hit. this is -- i -- this is an urgency in alaskan voices about

their future economic growth model and concerns senator murkowski expressed as production declines, needing to find new opportunities, having legislation is white house pulling offshore, onshore land away from exploration. what's the mood? what's the sense. and tell us, because what's going to be interesting, the next two year there is will be a lot of meetings with the arctic council. they're all going to be in alaska. they're going to hear an alaskan perspective on this. and i would like you to preview that perspective. >> well, it will be loud. you know, the legislature is supposed to adjourn under statutory requirements sunday night at midnight. and i'm not sure they're going to get out of town on time. one of the things that is battering us in particular at the moment is the fact that is down so low at this point,

running around 500,000 barrels a day from the original 2 million barrels a day. in the past, including when i was chairing the senate finance committee and oil dropped to $9.50 a barrel, even though the state budget depends over 90% on the revenues that we get from our oil and gas resources, and from the production of those resources, we were able to get through the times of really low oil prices because we had a robust -- in taps frankly. we've seen production come back up. that's excellent. but that continued drop in taps is really battering the budget, and will continue to for the future until we can figure out a way to get more oil into what is not just an alaska important infrastructure, but it's a national energy security infrastructure that needs to be protected for the nation's

benefit, not just for alaskans. the mood is somber, but alaskans are resilient. goodness knows so many alaskans have, as i've said, they've been there for thousands of years and they've been adapting for that entire time. so there's a resiliency. but there's also -- i would say a hopefulness that together alaskans can come through, make some changes to our base budget, but also see opportunities in the future that will help provide continued jobs for alaskans and for our children and grandchildren, but also support the budget. it's never bad to look at budgets and see where there may be some bloat. and that is happening. but the legislature and the governor will be careful not to try to go too deep. the former lieutenant governor

is smiling at me. >> i sense mead may have a question when we turn to the audience. infrastructure is exactly where i want to go. but carol, because the report did have a reflection on infrastructure, if you could just share a brief thought on that. and paula, you have been focusing on transportation and infrastructure, now that's obviously from shale gas and i would love your reflections on this. infrastructure and national pry orization. >> so we do have on entire chapter in the report dedicated to logistics and infrastructure and recognize it's a significant challenge to progressing with the development in the alaskan argument. -- arctic. with regard to exploration, the infrastructure needs are much lower, as the industry moves forward -- as shell moves guard with their plans, they will be bringing all the required equipment with them in order to safely and responsibly execute the program. including the oil spill response

vessels and support that they are required to bring by permit. with regard to the longer infrastructure needs, the report does a very good job of cataloging the current state of infrastructure. what's available today, what the gaps and opportunities are, and then make some recommendations to move forward. probably the most important one is that we see merit in continued emphasis on joint scenario planning, including the federal government, the state government, the local communities, probably most importantly and they likely would be in the best position to lead such an activity. the oil and gas industry, but also fisheries, tourism, et cetera, infrastructure, is a shared resource, so a joint scenario plan could potentially open up the opportunity for partnerships in particular areas

between governments and industry, public and private partnerships as the senator was talking about earlier. >> sure, thanks, heather. in here in the lower 48, we talk about the revolution and the knowledge that we have great rocks and that comes in really handy. and the other reason we're the envy of the world is we have an incredibly robust delivery. and we have 2.4 million miles of gas pipeline alone. nowhere else in the world would you find infrastructure so prevalent. so with this in mind, the president has commissioned the review that will be released very shortly, and the first year is focused on delivery infrastructure. and understanding what our needs are going forward in an integrated manner, and as that begins to roll out soon, you'll see, i think a key learning from that is that energy infrastructure, the infrastructure that secures our energy is not just pipes and tankers.

it is ports roads bridges. it is all part of what underpins our economy, whether here in the lower 48 or alaska. and you see incredible focus in the the senator's remarks this morning, as well as in our visit to alaska, a tremendous -- i mean, there was a great deal of priority and debate being focused on a natural gas pipeline, for example, in alaska as well as the future of taps and how to ensure it. and it goes hand in hand to develop the resource and the knowledge you can move the resource to markets where it's valued. whether in alaska and in other places. so this all combined with the changing nature of the climate and new challenges that we are seeing of the impacts of climate change on coastal communities and ports as well as roads. whether they're traditional

roads or ice roads and new challenges with being able to build and maintain them, as well as t pipeline infrastructure. this is something i think we're going to be discussing quite robustly over the coming years because there are tremendous investments that we need to make. onshore as well as offshore, and thinking about data and communications as well as in securing maritime shipping lanes. and the port support that would provide for spill response, for example. this is the age of infrastructure. and we should all be very focused on thinking of the ways we can support the development, because this is the underpinning for our economic and energy security. >> well said. it's time for the audience to engage in the discussion, if you have any questions or comments, please raise your hand and give us your name and affiliation. if you're too shy, mead, i'm going to put you right on the spot. so i think i will put mead treadwell right on the spot. i'll introduce you so you don't

have to, mead. >> thanks, heather. my affiliation is heather and i are working on bringing investment to the arctic, and pleased to be here today. and thank you for your report. i'm sorry i missed your presentations on alaska last week. as former chair of the research commission i can tell you one of our last meetings as chair was at the white house just about the time the spill was happening. we had come up with suggestions on how the u.s. could better structure its support for oil and gas, or oil spill research. what did you find as you looked at both the public/private partnership that's happening in norway on oil and ice recovery, and what should we be doing specifically to meet the goal

where you saw deficiency here in this report? >> thanks for the question. oil spill prevention and response is the top topic on the mind of all stakeholders. and you know, i mentioned in our recommendation that we really want and need to see the department of interior specifically join with the industry in collaborating in this important area. i like the example that you cited in norway. for two reasons. the first is bessie has spent a lot of money in the area of oil spill in the arctic and they have a lot to bring to the table. they have a lot of expertise. and the second is they are importantly independent of the industry. it's not enough for the industry

to say that this particular response performed this way. we really need that independent view. what we think needs to happen is for the department of interior to join that group, bring their research to the table. we need to move forward with field tests in our arctic conditions. some of those have been advanced in other countries. but getting permits to do a field test of an oil spill response exercise is particularly difficult because no one wants to champion that. so we also see a need to move forward with permits necessary in that regard. there are discussions about building a specialized facility to test oil spill response off the east coast of canada in newfoundland. those are a couple of thoughts about what can be done in that very important area. >> just quickly, d.o.e. has

focused our research to a great extent on prevention of loss of control. we do a lot of work on integrity, understanding how your cement performs at pressure and depth. understanding the ocean currents and the stresses that puts on risers and translating that to our work on basic material science to understand what the risers are made of, for example. there's also, i think in the study, some recommendations that we'll be considering next. so we've been focused on the front end of the bow tie, if you will. but there's also opportunities on the right side as carol set out for us to with the department of interior to demonstrate the effectiveness of some of the technologies that are available to prevent or deal with loss of control of oil. so while to date we've been focused on preventing that.

your best way to prevent an oil spill is to design your well really well and never lose control of it to begin with. but if you do, there have emerged an array of technologies to deal with it. and what we need to do is make sure that we're demonstrating and testing those ways in ways that people have confidence in. that's what we'll be looking at in d.o.e., how we can participate in that through our national apps. >> one of the things that i learned and those of us who worked on the study who were neither industry and/or federal government is that there's not as much collaboration as we might expect or think or just thought was happening. for example, industry has an arctic joint industry project for slow response technology that the u.s. government is not party to. why? i was surprised by that. that bessie and others had not actually joined. so we saw lots of opportunities.

and i think i came away with the belief there needs to be better understanding by everyone of all the work that is being done, and all the work that has been done, and the technology that is out there, and whether we're practicing it and whether we're exercising it as well as we should is a different question. particularly in the u.s. where it's hard to get a permit to do a spill exercise. but there's kind of a step two, which is education, which is something that csis and other institutions like that might want to focus on. how do we get the word out there? what truly is happening. i would also say it provides an opportunity for the public/private partnerships that we're talking about. it's not just industry and the government. there are private companies around the world that are working on spill technology every day and have some really bright minds working on it. so there are real opportunities, and we should push forward to make those work for us.

>> i'll add my two cents. the arctic council is the international perspective here. they have been working on oil spill prevention. and i think they will be presenting a framework for that. but it's going to be u.s. chairmanship that's going to have to work the issue. i think in some ways, the arctic council, it does such amazing work. great assessments. marine shipping investment and then fabulous recommendations. and then okay. who makes sure the national government is really focused, really implements and bring those to fruition? this is going to be challenge for the u.s. i think the arctic economic council will have a big focus on energy and those implications. again, we're developing these good tools. we need the collaboration. >> and just one final point. dr. mike myers, who when we began the study as the university in charge of research. and when we ended the study is now the commissioner for the

state told us time and time again that everybody can do all of their research at the university of alaska fairbanks where they're actually building facilities for this type of research. so once again, bringing it home. >> you had a quick follow-up, and then i'll let others get in here. yes, sir. we're start with you. we'll get a microphone. >> no, no, here. yeah, yeah. >> my point about structure. >> just get a microphone. >> the oil pollution act of 1990 created an interagency committee on coordinating oil police and research. as we founded it, we called it the intergalactic. but i would really urge industry to play a much larger role in that committee. i would urge d.o.e. to play a much larger role on that committee. understand the work of the coast guard because they have the internal work. if state of alaska has put money toward the joint program. there is a way that we can come together. i find the issue with oil spills

is people who want to go ahead and drill want to pretend they don't happen. they can happen. we know they can happen, and we have to constantly be pushing that edge forward. that committee needs greater attention to the white house, and it needs greater participation by the federal agencies. >> one of the key findings was to secure public confidence in the development of oil and gas. and senator murkowski was touching upon the aspect of, you know, residents in the arctic being -- want to see development, while those outside, you know, want to preserve it. how do you address that giving the observation from many of the environmental ngos? >> well, i just want to point out one of the difficulties of

trying to address it. so, clearly you need public acceptance to move forward. but if you look at the accidents that have happened in terms of oil and gas-related industry in alaska and around the world, you'll find most of those are related to transportation, not to exploration phase and not to development phase. however, when you look at the new bessie arctic that came out last month, arguably because of the time lines that are written into, it pushes exploration rigs into a two-season event. rather than being able to go in, drill your well and actually do your testing in one year and then get out. if the real risk is during the the transportation phase, it does not make sense to push into two years where you have to stage twice. up and back and up and back.

because you have more ships in the water and more opportunity to have a transportation accident. so i think that what we need is a dialogue to understand what are the real risks, and what are the opportunities? and then we all have to accept that your risk is never going to be zero. just as mead said. we don't live in a zero-risk world. >> henry hedger, retired government researchers. perhaps you heard of botley plants for fresh water in finland where they use icebergs. the arctic has that tremendous amount of ice, and of course with the the climate change, they indicate it will melt. once it's melted, it's no longer serviceable. it becomes salt water in the ocean. the fresh water is a great resource, and botling plants would be needed, say in alaska. one of our own areas, let alone canada.

if they can reduce the amount of ice that's fresh or well and good, then less of a problem with the rising sea level. also job creation. thousands of jobs could be created. and not just bottles of water, but barrels of water could be shipped to areas of great concern like california, and you would have fresh water. do you have any comment? >> oh my goodness. drew? go for it. >> you know, there was just an article in the anchorage paper, maybe yesterday, that fresh water shipments are starting out of alaska to the lower 48. now that's not arctic water, but it's water. it's fresh water. so all the the way back to government hickle, but governor hickle had the dream of bringing alaska's fresh water resources south. various entities have picked up on that and have actually licensed some opportunities. i think you will see people move

forward, and looking at the water resources that we have in alaska as being a very important resource to the state. we're seeing that right now as kind of a fledgling industry in alaska. >> hi. john farrell, arctic research commission. i have a question for dr. gant. i was curious why secretary money commissioned this study. he will receive this report, and he will provide a response to the report, the recommendations in the report. is there anything at this point you can foreshadow as to what he might say in receiving the report and how he may consider the recommendations and begin to act on them? >> john, you know, i like my job and i would like to keep it. i'm not going to be so bold as

to suggest what the secretary might say. i can tell you that he and the deputy secretary were very pleased with the quality of this report. it's 550 pages of a lot of great science consolidated there. and we expect it will be a great resource for people as they come to the arctic. particularly those like me that know a lot less about it than you do, john. with regard to -- there are a number of recommendations that relate directly to d.o.e. and where we might pursue science and research. and almost all of those -- not only do they speak to our core mission and our core capabilities. but they are also implicitly represent our collaboration with other agencies, as well as our work and the work that the commission has going on as well. so as the secretary considers these recommendations and next

steps, we will be working with our inner agency partners and other federal partners that were involved in the study efforts and recommendations to understand not only which piece of these recommendations seem -- because we can't do everything at once -- the most imperative in priority from a time perspective, but which should be done through vehicles like our national labs. which should be done in direct partnerships with other agencies. which should be done through the arctic research council, our other agencies, or through partnerships at the state level. as drew mentioned, the university of alaska fairbanks has tremendous capabilities in this area and they're already a great partner for us. so we'll be looking for input as we move forward. and i'll let the secretary speak for himself when he does. thanks for the question. >> i would like to make a comment. i really appreciate the question as well. we want the report to be read

and have impact. but i want to integrate that question with the question we had over here on how to navigate the complex question that the senator laid out for us. should we progress with development, and how do we balance that with concern for the changing climate. i think the answer is in a debate that's rooted in science and research. not the sound bites that come across on twitter. not the statistics that are short quotes without the technical data to back up what they mean. you know, you could -- you could identify -- in our report we say the risk of a well controlled event in the arctic with new technology is extremely remote. how do i reconcile that with a quote that says the risk of an oil spill is 70%?

the risk of an oil spill this summer is not 70%. the data behind that calculation is that risk is over the next 70 years. penal don't say that on twitter. but what we really need to do is get the scientific community together. john's organization, the industry experts, paula's team together to explore the findings in this report. do you agree with them? if not, what more science and technology is needed in order to move forward? and as paula outlined in her opening questions, only then can we have good science, good research, inform good policy. and that's how i think we can find some middle ground between these very polarized opinions a and move beyond them being someone's personal opinion. >> well, unfortunately the time

is close. i'm going to have to cut it off here. but as you can tell, what a privilege it was to be a part of the team of such thoughtful people trying to wrestle with extremely tough, complex questions. and we know the stakes are enormous. i think when you showed richard glenn's quote, we need a little rock 'n' roll concert. we need to jazz up our conversation on the future of the development of the arctic. please join me in thanking our panelists for a great presentation. now don't go away. we're going to very switch panelists and conclude with the arctic health discussion. thank you.

>> the speakers are two doctors and a gee yog fi professor from george washington university. this is an hour and 20 minutes. we're beginning our last panel here will run until 1:00 p.m. focuses on health. i want to first of all congratulate heather and heather conley and carolyn roloff, colleague here at csic for the production of this report which i hope you all had

a chance to get and what is available electronically online. this is a terrific and very timely piece of work that brings together, as we'll hear from heather, in one place a lot of data a lot of analysis a lot -- sich waits it all in the context of what has been going on up to this time in engagement in the arctic on the health. what do we know and what is the possibilities here in terms of concrete additional action by the u.s. government in its chairmanship of the arctic council over the next two years which begins next week. thank you for going that. congratulations. that's terrific. senator murkowski this morning in here speech made a powerful point. and that is all action by the u.s. government and all other

governments in the arctic need to put the human reality the individual and the community at the center stage in discussing the future and in discussing the approaches that are going to be taken. i think this gives us a wide open door for talking about these issues and where we are going to go. the way we're going to do our business today we're going to ask heather to give us a quick synopsis of the report and what it contains. then we're going to move in sequence. we're going to have pamela collins, who is a psychiatrist an m.d., director of the office for research on disparities and global mental health at the national institute of mental health, pamela came to us, we've known each other a little bit over the years. roger glass, who is with us today, roger thank you for joining us. roger kindly connected us. thank you for coming and being

with us. pamela will role through eight or ten minutes of presentation on the work that nimh is leading in this area. we will then move to dr. michael bruce, based in anchorage. thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. he will walk through the cdc program in some detail as well. we're using this really as an occasion for getting these two lead u.s. agencies to tell us what they do tell us what the major challenges and issue focus will be and what the future might look like in terms of continued work intensified efforts in this area. dr. bruce is the epidemiology health leader and has put predominant focus on a wide range of research and studies

across vaccine preventable diseases, health disparities, chronic disorders. so we're thrilled that miking is with us. our fourth speaker is dr. tim think, who is a research professor at george aug university and a leading polar expert. a migration expert and dem mog fer who has been working on polar geography and polar environments for his entire career. he's one of the contributing author to the newly complete and newly issued about a month ago arctic human development report which some of you i hope have had a chance to look at. ten year study. builds on the 2004 study. comes out. it's full of enormous amount of insight and detail. and we were very fortunate through heather's intervention to enlist timothy to come down

and be here with us today. so thank you for making the journey to be here with us. once we roll through the presentations, we'll have a bit of a conversation amongst ourselves. but we're going to move to you all very rapidly to get your opinions and comments. so please be ready for that. and heather, the floor is yours. >> thank you so much, steve. and it is wonderful to be table to have such a great partner. steve and i, our offices are right beside each other, and i'll tell you how this idea came about. we were talking, and i had sort of gotten the nickname at the office the polar princess, the arctic queen because i do so much on the arctic. he said we should do something together. we should collaborate together, having the health program be a part of the conversation. funny you should ask. health is not an issue in the policy space that we focus on as

much. we know the u.s. chairmanship, one of the mayor themes is the economic and the livelihoods of people in the north, a focus on that. and we really need to pull this information together. what do we know? what is the united states doing about it? and then, i said, of course, the timing is perfect because we know the arctic human development report, which first issued in 2004, so, as it was issued, it was a 2014 report that was issued a little bit later in february of 2015. we'd have ten years to see what has changed. where is the focus that we need to do? so all of these elements came together, and really encouraged us to put this report together. so many thanks to the global health program for being part of that. and of course my colleague caroline roloff was absolutely instrumental in developing this report as well. you're so sick of hearing from me today. i'm going to be extremely brief, and i really want to hear from our panelists. this is part of -- i'm going to take my notes and be copious. i'm going to learn a lot here too. but i just want to do a couple of highlights in the report. i think the first thing that strikes me, i think it strikes

anyone that doesn't know this topic and begins to read it is the huge challenge of mental health and suicide prevention. a recent -- this comes from our report. a recent study has found that every five suicide rates increase by 18%. now just to bring this home closer for the state of alaska, an alaskan natives, the rates of suicide increased 500% since 1960 with rates four times higher among 10 to 19-year-old alaskan natives than their nonnative peers. this is striking. and it certainly is a huge crisis. there's a whole issue of mental health chal ledges that are profound. we hope this study reinforces

the urgency. there's other pressing issues that just require continued focus. the change in food habits, increased rates in diabetes, heightened impact on the food security of environmental contaminants contaminants. some of this things are from the changes in the climates but as the food cycle so dramatically changes. but the arctic picture is a close one. there is no one model. you have a different health spectrum in the market where the in order it's more different in other communities. so the challenge for the arctic council as it's developing its thinking is how -- there's not one size meets all. but how do you meet the needs, bring the studying with the information the focus together.

there's lots of information in the report. welcome you to read it. i want to conclude by highlights some recommendations. i am a proponent of really thinking the arctic council's government structure in light of its 20th birthday. it was designed in 1976 for one purpose. as we've just talked about over the last couple 0 hours so much as changed. do we have the right alignment in our working groups? do we have the right alignment in how the arctic council meets these challenges. we very provocatively recommend that the arctic council should think about having a working group designated for arctic health and well being. if people are at the center of this policy, which they are, we have a flora and fauna working

group, the protection or the arctic and marine environment. i would like to see a to kusd working group on health. if we think it's important, we put it out there. so as i said, i no that will -- that's a pretty provocative recommendation but we think it's the one thing that could perhaps be a legacy for the u.s. chairmanship and moving forward. the second linkage, as you've heard from our discussion on energy resource development, what we really found in our report, there is a link between economic development and growth and mental wellness and well-being. maybe we should be a little bit more specific about that linkage where people have livelihood, their living standards are increasing. can we make that linkage? can the arctic economic council have a direct role in how the private sector, public private partnerships are engaging in these pressing health issues for

arctic communities. and of course, as part of all of this is how do we engage traditional knowledge in working towards an improved arctic health and well-being picture. i think again, the working group, a new working group could bring that traditional knowledge in. we have other recommendations, obviously, it is our hope that the u.s. chairmanship focuses like a laser beam on these issues. we know mental health and suicide prevention is part of it and i know our colleagues will give us great insights on what the work of their agencies are doing. we want to raise this up and highlight it and certainly want to impress upon policy makers that this is a critical issue that demands our full attention. senator murkowski talked about the young people and their enthusiasm. we can't have arctic young people not seeing a promising future and committing suicide. with that steve, thank you so

much. >> thank you. pamela. >> thank you and thank you for the introduction. it's a pleasure to be here. the many opportunities and challenges we've heard discussed this morning, i'll focus in on one of those, which is the area of suicide and suicide prevention. just to orient all of you, this graph -- i'm pressing the wrong one. this graph shows you some data on suicide rates in the united states over the last 20 years. the red line shows you homicide rates in the united states, which you can see have dropped substantially over the last 20 years. suicide rates have increased by 17% from 2002 to 2012. and in 2013 there were about 41,000 suicides in the u.s. to give you a sense of when we're talking about the polar communities, where do we stand? the bottom red arrow shows the u.s. suicide rate in comparison

to other countries and subcommittees in the arctic. the top red arrow shows you the suicide rate in alaska. one of the main takeaways from this point is first of all to orient you, the yellow bars represent nordic communities and regions and nordic countries and regions and green represents greenland. the blue represents russia and regions in russia. and the red is north america and regions so the -- as i mentioned, the bottom red bar is the united states suicide rate and the other by the red air row is alaska. and if you -- what you can also note from the slide is is that as you go higher, the bars that are the higher rates often represents indijen nous communities, there's variation within countries with indij nus

groups often at the higher rate for suicide. these are data from alaska specifically. and again, because -- just to orient you to what the lines are, the bottom line in yellow shows nonnative alaskans and these are females. nonnative female suicide rate. the next line that went around -- the brown line, nonnative males in alaska and top line represents alaska native young men and men. so again, huge differences by ethnicity with -- and certainty regional variation within alaska too where there are certain communities in alaska that have higher suicide rates than others. this is a complex problem, not the same everywhere, but clearly this group of men and young men in particular are the group that are at the highest risk among

alaskan natives. >> the conversations about -- thank you. the conversations about suicide prevention in the united states are happening at an opportune time. the u.s. just published this agenda for suicide prevention in 2014. with an ambitious goal of seeing that suicide can be reduced over the next five years should the research end result in policy services interventions be implemented, and an ambitious goal of seeing 40% reduction over the next ten years in the united states. given that we can implement what we know needs to happen. at the same time, the w.h.o. published earlier in 2014 it's world suicide report. also setting ambitious targets and looking at what are the regional differences around the world and what can we learn as a global community to address suicide.

>> i just want to highlight a couple of cross-cutting things that are relevant to arctic countries. one is a positive approach, testing approaches that initiate and maintain healthy behaviors that can lead to reduction and risk. testing interventions aimed at reducing risk factors but using technology to facilitate social connections and help seeking. and using practical trials to determine the benefits of quality improvement in health care systems and recognizing that these interventions need to happen in the context of quality mental health service delivery and quality health care delivery. and finally, recognizing that these are interventions that need to take place intersectly. i spent some days, a few days

ago, the canadian institutes of health research sponsored a meeting of report out on the mental wellness project that they did underneath the canadian chairmanship. and it was a great discussion. the canadians sponsored a couple of teams to do an environmental scan of available interventions that are being implemented in communities that communities find promising, particularly looking to see what is it that indigenous communities find most important and what do they consider practice -- what do they consider promising interventions and what were the evidence based interventions. and some of the lessons that

came from this conversation were that solutions need to be cultural grounded. they need to be community based and community driven. there was a lot of discussion to realize this was not a one size fit's all, these need to be adapted for context. what's the importance of cultural appropriately shared interventions across communities. how can one learn from simply implementing the mental health services needed, for example, how can we learn from cooperation that would benefit multiple communities. another takeaway was the solution studies of these problems need to be solution focused instead of problem focused again, how do we focus on health and strengthening health.

even while we're trying to reduce risk and reduce bad outcomes. communities and clinics and governments and others needs to know what works in order to know what to implement more widely. a number of questions arose, how do we do that? how do we know how communities define what works? that's not always the same as the researchers define what works. how do decision workers define what works and where do they intersect. >> finally as i mentioned, they noted there were two studies of interventions with the rigorous evaluation. opportunities that we see from the u.s. perspective, first of all acknowledging that these problems need shared knowledge and tailored efforts. but when we're tailoring interventions, how can we be sure others are learning from intervention. if they are successful, what's required for implementation. and once an intervention is implemented, how can one ensure that the irn ter vengs can be

sustained. how can the results of successful interventions to aid sustainability and one answer may come in how we approach testing the efficacy of these interventions and that includes figuring out how can we harmonize to provide a shared language to community to different stake holders. >> an important issue arose in the conversations and that is that if we want to think about wellness and health, there are many slices to the pie. focusing on the health sector alone is not sufficient, one has to think about the economic sector and we talked about this, economy, physical environment climate and also remembering social history and how that influences the way the people respond to current challenges. so the u.s. proposed project under the arctic council was called reducing incidents of

suicide in indigenous groups or rising sun. the context for this was remembering that as i've shown you in the first slides, there's an elevated risk of suicide in these remote rural arctic communities. we're talking about communities with significant cultural diversity and very small populations. so the standard approaches that researchers tend to use to evaluate the efficacy and the effectiveness of interventions is quite challenging. what might be a way to get around those things? there are also important assumptions and those are that efforts also have to continue, of course, beyond what's proposed under the u.s. chairmanship and under the sustainable development working group specifically and that these proposed projects like rising sun can move the agenda forward, but they have to happen in concert with broader ongoing efforts for service delivery for

research and these other interventions as well. some of the questions that rising sun hopes to answer are, can lessons about the impact of suicide prevention interventions be learned from information across more than one arctic community? would this be facilitated by identifying common measures to assess the outcomes and what are the underlying themes that are most frequently measured across these interventions. so what might this look like. some of which were highlighted in canada and those interventions target policies and health systems and some are clinic based and some more community level interventions focusing on bringing youth in particular back to -- back in touch with their cultural traditions, and some of them are focused at individual levels.

what we hope to do is prepare a tool kit that takes into account these various levels of intervention and meaningful outcome measures. that can be used to harmonize the evaluation and enable communities to measure what's relevant to their needs and would enable the sharing and comparing of data across studies of effectiveness. and this we hope will be able to be amenable for community use that will take into consideration what communities value in terms of outcomes that will take into consideration the kinds of data that subnational governments are currently using in value in terms of outcomes and will also use the expertise of researchers working on methods appropriate for this kind of evaluation. thank you. [ applause ]

>> thank you very much, pamela, dr. bruce. >> can we pull up the slides? there it is. okay. thanks very much for having me here to speak to you about cdc's role in activities in regards to human health in the arctic ks subarctic. i'm going to work off a series of slides. this is a slide that shows you sort of cdc's assets in the arctic ab i work with the arctic investigations program, 33 people total, we also have a quarantine station there focused on infectious diseases. we have a national institute of safety and health office there and have an atsdr office. so our mission at arctic investigations program is to prevent infectious disease of people in the arctic and subarctic, with a specialty on

high incidents concern among indigenous people. our priority areas are surveillance of infectious diseases and emerging diseases and reducing health disparities and leadership in sir qume polar health. one of them is international surveillance and we're the headquarters for a circumpolar network across the artic. that map shows you in the darker color, the countries that participate and we've recently added tb on. so if it was a map showing tb, russia would be included as well. some of the things that can come out of this network, we've been able to identify outbreaks of infectious diseases across the

different countries and been able to identify new emerging infections and we've been working over the past decade to identify a new infection that has a case if a talt rate of about 10% in our children. we worked closely to work on this issue. and we also work with the international union for health, i'm the former president of the union and work with american society and also the former president of and mainly through through a variety of different infectious disease working groups. and these groups fall within the union's purview. we also work with the u.s. interagency arctic research policy committee.

there's a cdc rep from our office that co-chairs that meeting and dr. roger glass, i believe also co-chairs from nih and he's here today. we also work with arctic council particularly we have a representative dr. tom hennessey who is my boss and director of the arctic investigations program. and the they advice the sustainable development working group of the arctic council. then we've been working on a number of health initiatives in alaska. one is the alaska water and sewer challenge. and i'll tell you more about that in subsequent slides. but one of the things we're trying to do is take a local alaska specific initiative to improve water distribution and sewer system availability to people and internationalize and expand it to our international

partners. we also work within a group called the one help working group in alaska that's led by the alaskan tribal health consortium. that's looking at human and animal and environmental health. i'm going to speak about water sanitation and health in alaska. in alaska we're behind in terms of rural alaska in terms of the percentage of homes with complete plumbing. in the u.s. we went from 55% in 1940 up to 100% in lower 48 states, alaska is pretty high. but in rural alaska, as of 2010, draw a line across, we're where the u.s. was in 1959 in terms of plumbing. we're pretty far behind. about 25% of villages in rural alaska have no running water or sewer.

the picture on the upper left is a person going to a water distribution point filling a plastic bucket with water and then in the upper right, he takes the bucket back to his home and dumps it in a plastic garbage can and that's their water source in the home. that's where they pull their water out of. in the lower left is the toilet. that's what we call a honey bucket. it's a bucket with a toilet seat on it. you can see the right side picture next to it, someone is emptying that in a receptacle. they have to carry it and slosh it around and spill and dump into receptacle. in the winter it gets cold and that freezes, they dump the frozen blocks into the sewage lagoon. in alaska we called those poopsicles. if you're rationing water in the village, your priority will be for drinking and cooking and

much lesser priority for personal hygiene and washing clothing and cleaning the home. when people think about water borne disease, most people think of pathogens in the water causing illness. we think in alaska, water washed diseases are probably of greater importance. that is people rationing water, they are not washing their hands, there's lack of water for hygiene and that allows for person to person transmission of a variety of infectious diseases. we've done a number of different studies in alaska. this is one slide on the -- you can see proportion of homes served with piped water on the y axis and rates of illness in children less than 5 in alaska. and see that in villages with less than 10% of running water, the invasive rates are high, 400 per 100,000. as the water service increases,

the rates of disease go down. we've seen this for a number of other diseases also. so increasing the proportion of alaskans with access to waste water services is quite important to alaskans and one of the 25 leading health indicators for healthy alaskans 2020. at baseline in 2012, 78% of rural homes had running water. our target for 2020 is 87%. i pulled this off the web. that red stop sign signal means we're not on target to reach our 87% of water distribution systems to rural homes, which is a bit alarming. one of the things that we've done in response to this that actually isn't me, it's the department of environmental conservation at the state of alaska, has put forth the alaska water and sewer challenge.

this is the website at the bottom if you want more information. basically this is a challenge that was put out to ask for teams to come together and propose decentralized water distribution systems for rural alaska. there are many places in rural alaska that will never have piped water, where the substrate is -- you can't put in pipes. there are other places where it probably isn't affordable. we need some alternate technologies, in innovative technologies to help us with this. these teams, the work they do is private sector driven. they need to be able to provide sufficient water for health. it needs to be affordable for the homeowner, feasible capital costs, long term operability and they need to get using input

from communities. right now they are evaluating the six teams and will hone it down to three. those three teams proposals are going to be implemented in rural villages and we're going to look over a period of a year to see how they do in terms of health outcomes and engineering, did it work, and then in terms of acceptability within the community. and so that's actually ongoing right now. and then this is just one of my last slides, just thinking about the upcoming u.s. chairmanship of the arctic council and water and sanitation initiative. i guess some of the deliverables that we have for this are -- we're planning on a white paper looking at water and sanitation across the arctic, looking at populations with in-home water service and challengers and proposed solutions. we're going to be traveling less than two months to the finland international congressman and discuss with our international

partners. and we're planning on a water and sanitation conference bringing together circumpolar partners and internationalizing the challenge for all of the arctic. we're sponsoring that in anchorage, sponsored by the state of alaska, in september of 2016 looking for innovations in water distribution for small communities. we have many partners in this effort that i have listed up here, and for the sake of time, i'll say thank you and that's it. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, michael.

timothy? >> go the other way. >> do they load it? sorry. we need to load your slides up. did they not hit the right button? there's always the technology challenge. you start your presentation and we'll catch up. ad lib. >> i've been asked to talk about the arctic human development report which recently came out. as heather said it was -- i guess it came out a couple of months ago but dated 2014. this is the second arctic human development report and first published in 2004.

one of the things -- well, i guess i'm going through my slides already. it was put together by a number of different teams or some 27 authors and three leave editors, very international team drawing from across the arctic. here we go. >> she took the keyboard. she's going to bring it back. >> across the arctic. this is not a research report necessarily, it's more of a review of research that other people have done so yeah, done under the auspices of sustainable development. we have a number of target audiences. and one was the arctic council and policy makers in the arctic and others in the arctic like yourselves. what we found is from the first arctic human development report, colleges and universities use this report rather extensively, these are the different chapters in the arctic human development report. i'm the lead author on the

migrational poll. but i'll focus on the chapter of human health and well-being. we have had a number of guiding questions that the author and author teams were asked to address. one was how does the arctic differ from outside world and corps of the arctic states? certainly look at issues of ethnicity and how those affect populations of the arctic. climate change was a factor also. and certainly regional variations among the different parts of the arctic and i'll certainly highlight those, and how did the changes over roughly the first decade of the 20th century since the first arctic human development report. but focusing on health disparities or health, the issue of disparities, continuing

health disparities is an issue. the previous speaker has highlighted and in this chapter that's a trend highlighted in a number of different places, disparities between countries and the disparity between indigenous and nonindigenous people. i pulled in section from the report and i think in heather's report, this different grouping, nordic country's overall high health indicators, not large disparities between the different peoples, and then the kind of western-northern american arctic, rather good health indicators overall. but between indigenous and nonindigenous, greenland, regions, again high disparities between those places and canada and denmark. then the russian arctic which i'll highlight overall poor health indicators in general.

this is from -- just one of the short examples from the health atlas. what he does, he contrasts infant mortality between greenland and denmark and the story is greenland is 30 years behind denmark in reducing infant mortality, the two lines converge rather nicely but 30-year generation gap. this is from my chapter again, highlighting these regional disparities among the 27 or so arctic regions. you can see here there's a huge difference between the fair islands, iceland, some of these places and then going down -- to make this international comparison -- according to the u.n. definition. this huge difference and where

you have a life expectancy of 58 years, large difference between men and women. and one of the factors that drives a lot of the overall disparities is the differences between men and women. on the left side are the russian regions where men -- women outlive men by over a decade. and these are some extremely large differences, possibly some of the largest in the world. and the point is, when you have roughly half of your population with a low life expectancy, you're going to have low overall life expectancy. infant mortality shows somewhat the same trends. the highest rates of infant mortality are in some of these prominently indigenous regions or countries, greenland, going down to places like iceland and some of the nordic countries

which are really having among the lowest levels of infant mortality in the world. but just one thing i want to highlight, i put the whole world and then less developed countries to show even though these are high relatively to some of these countries, the arctic and arctic regions actually, you know, exist within highly developed high income countries. there's possibly some hope or something that can be drawn upon there. apologize for the quality of this graph, but basically the point of this shows the trends in tb across the circumpolar regions. you can see the large declines in tb but kind of continued disparities in tb. this -- one of the previous speakers talked about suicide. this is from some work that jack

hicks has done looking at suicide rates in canada and then among the inuet. you can see relatively flat and the trend in nunavut continued to grow up. jack is a rather cheerful guy and this is depressing research to do. he correlates this with various historical events and points out the clustering of suicides. this is from some work i did. this shows the sex ratio of males to females in russia. this is 1989 prior to the breakup of the soviet union. you can see most of the arctic, northern regions have much higher male sex ratio than the rest of the country. this is because the demands of industry and industry can draw more men than women. as the -- i do a lot of research on migration, looking at the changing sex ratios in the

arctic, i'll be telling a migration story and men with cope with downsizing of the arctic and northern economy y you can see declining male sex ratio, only a quarter is due to migration. three-quarters of it due to the fact that men are dying in larger numbers than women in the russian north. and if we keep going down, this male sex ratio continues to decline. these gaps in life expectancy, russia overall has among the highest female advantages and life expectancy and some of these regions it's extraordinarily high. and i speculate that it's probably among the highest in the world. the first arctic human development report really focused on health and the chapter was called health and well-beg, but this one try s toies to

stress that and look more broadly at that all indicators of well-being looking at what the health or health care sector can do. its probably hard to read but the starts on the right basically show the trends in gdp and the trends in life expectancy over the first decade of the 20th century. the green shows improvement, red shows the decline and for most of the arctic countries, there has generally been an improvement in life -- improvement in both in life expectancy and in gdp. and there's -- the detail maybe if you're interested what the arctic human development reports, subsequent reports to that, they take the u.n. human development index through three components of that but then they try to add others that are kind of arctic

specific, fate control, cultural identity or language or tension closest to nature, things that are important particularly to people in the arctic. so to conclude, there has been a lot of research on health and health, well-being of indigenous people. previous speakers talked about that in this chapter and the report talks about that there's been a number of different research intervention efforts underway to improve the health and well-being of people in the arctic. i mean, one of the takeaway messages in the report is that there has been, you know, considerable improvement in a lot of areas of health. i pointed out life expectancy and others. but there are issues health issues in the arctic that remain rather intractable. when i showed about suicide, tb and some others, some sexually transmitted diseases and domestic violence, they just don't really show any sign of improvement, and i think the report talks about the warming climate and how this may impact

water, food security, certainly some infectious diseases and things like that. and lastly senator murkowski talked about the importance of educating the next generation about the arctic, and i think some other speakers mentioned that, as well, so i'll finish with this slide. this shows my young 2-year-old daughter looking at the arctic human development report when it came in. notice the smile on her face and the thrill with this. she was actually born and raised kind of during my writing of this whole thing, so i'll stop there and take any questions you may have. [ applause ] thanks very much. we've heard a lot about suicide, we've heard a lot about water and sanitation, both with respect to the work on your way specific to alaska but also work that is under way in the broader

arctic council context. so, i take that to mean from certainly the cdc and nih perspective that these are the areas where there's the greatest promise, and there's an agenda formed up and away forward. i also took away from listening to your presentations and listening to tim that we need to be quite realistic, that there are -- there are some significant barriers to really carrying forward that agenda or other broader infectious disease agendas. the huge variation, as you pointed out, huge variation culturally, demographically, and geographically, very significant differences across these different communities and sovereign entities. we didn't talk much about what the political barriers might be in terms of getting cooperation

within the council on some of these very sensitive and culturally based problems, and we didn't hear much about the questions of prioritization across the constituent governments that we're talking about. to what degree are these issues, some issues within a broader health spectrum, to what degree are these becoming prioritized and is there political well and financial resources and commitments to try to move this agenda forward. so, on the one hand, we have the u.s. coming into the chairmanship next week. we have these -- this body of work out there, we have the human development report out, there's a lot of new content to move forward. there's a lot of active ongoing work. but what can we -- what should we realistically expect in the two-year, the period of the two-year chairmanship in moving the agenda forward, both at home

and in the state of alaska, but on the broader context of the arctic council. maybe i could ask pamela and michael to say a few words about sort of what your hope is given that mix of both opportunities that have arisen, all of the good works that you've done and some of the questions around what is this environment? what are we likely to see in this period? how do we set our compasses in a realistic way? pamela and michael? >> well, i think one important aspect of the u.s. chairmanship is bringing attention to these issues, the mental health needs in the arctic and alaska specifically, bringing attention to where the risks,bring ago tension to what resources we have to build on. so that's one important issue. from the nih certainly will continue to fund research to

try to answer some of these questions in alaska specifically and as well as in other -- in other sites as relevant. but i think that's a big one. and i think the opportunity to have a mental health project as one of the sustainable development working group projects invites this collaboration across countries to address some of these issues. so, as i mention in the presentation, the project in sustainable development working group is one such thing but certainly within nhs with respect to mental health interventions, the substance abuse and mental health services administration continues to support work on service delivery for mental health, as well as for substance abuse and suicide prevention. they, in fact, just released an rfa earlier this month for tribal communities on suicide prevention intervention.

so to make a long story short, there are many things happening in concert, but i think this is a great platform to bring attention to an area that often does not get the kind of attention it needs in the global health context particularly and with respect to thinking about the disparities in mental health that are clearly evident. >> you do feel that the -- the groundwork has been done in terms of the rising sun, a consensus among the constituent governments of the arctic council, that this framework -- there is a buy-in for this framework, a preliminary buy-in to move this forward? >> so, when you say groundwork, so yes, this has been a proposed project that has been reviewed by the various members of the arctic council. and that at this point, we do have buy-in from countries that would like to join us in this work. so, we're looking forward to it. >> what is it going to take in

your estimation to bring it to life and carry it forward? would you say? >> so for that specific project, there will be -- it will take country partners that will commit funds to move that project forward, and i think we're expecting some of those kinds of commitments to occur, and we'll certainly hear more about this after the u.s. officially assumes the chairmanship so commitment of time commitment of funds, commitment of expertise and commitment of helping us to gain access to those networks out there that bring access not only to the experts but also to the community members who we hope to engage in this process as well. >> thank you. michael, on the arctic water and sanitation issue if you can say a few word ss about how much consensus exists today and what is it going to take to really move this forward in the next two years? >> sure, yeah, i guess i would

second pam's comments in terms of increasing and strengthening our collaboration with our international partners. i've been working in the arctic now for -- it's my 16th year, and when we started the circumpolar surveillance system, it brought us together, it focused on infectious diseases, there's more to it out there and broadening that with our partners is very important. but with a focus on health. and so we've tried to address many of the health -- a number of different health issues in alaska, but our current focus is on water and sanitation. and one of the reasons for that is that -- i said a little bit about it earlier. we have piped water to about 78% of those rural villages but there's a significant portion