Sharing Good Practice Throughout the Responder Community: Ten Years of the Global Response Network

Abstract

Abstract The Global Response Network (GRN) is a collaboration of industry funded Oil Spill Response Organisations (OSROs) created to share good practice for the wider benefit of the oil industry. Created in 2005, the GRN was originally conceived as a mechanism to facilitate the sharing of trained response personnel at a time when the global pool of responders was much smaller than now and spills were becoming less frequent, thanks to improvements in ship design, operation and regulation. Personnel sharing arrangements under the GRN were designed to enable individual responders to gain valuable spill experience more easily and thereby enhance experience levels across the global pool. It was also envisaged that the cooperation among participating OSROs would enable the sharing of specialised equipment resources for the benefit of the collective industry membership. Although the core membership of the GRN has remained largely unchanged since its creation, the purpose and modus operandi of the GRN has evolved considerably in that time. Today the key added value provided by the GRN comes from sharing knowledge and information more than sharing people and equipment. This is particularly evidenced by the industry action which followed in the wake of the Montara (2009) and Macondo (2010) incidents. The international oil industry undertook a Joint Industry Project (JIP) to coordinate this unprecedented effort to apply the lessons from these incidents in order to improve the management and technical aspects of spill response. Today the challenge is to integrate and harmonise the various outputs from this effort throughout the responder community and the GRN is playing a key role in this. One way this is being achieved is through the “Confident Ambassador” programme, whereby responders are familiarised with the JIP outputs and the accompanying communications toolkit. A slide deck has been created for OSRO use to help responder organisations achieve deeper understanding of the science of response within their own organisations and, more importantly, to help disseminate consistent messages about industry approaches to oil spill preparedness and response to a wide range of external stakeholders that the responder community engages with. This paper explores this and other facets of the evolution of the GRN through its first ten years, from a resource enabling organisation to a knowledge and information sharing organisation befitting the post-Macondo paradigm. The paper also considers future trends that may shape the next phase of evolution for the GRN.