Ciel Organization

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The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) is committed to strengthening and using international law and institutions to protect the environment, promote human health, and ensure a just and sustainable society. CIEL is a non-profit organization dedicated to advocacy in the global public interest, including through legal counsel, policy research, analysis, education, training and capacity building.

(Gothenburg, Sweden) As people and ecosystems around the world are increasingly exposed to multiple and interacting hazardous chemicals, experts from leading international law and global chemical safety organizations are releasing a groundbreaking report that offers a clear pathway to finance the control and regulate toxic chemicals and waste: a producer-pays tax on basic chemicals.

The chemical industry generates trillions of dollars in annual sales (projecting sales over USD 11 trillion in 2030), but it does not bear the significant health and environmental costs that derive from its activities. These costs, according to World Health Organization estimates, include 1.6 million annual premature deaths due to the global disease burden attributable to preventable chemical mismanagement and 45 million Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs).

The proposal by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) asserts that chemical producers must take greater financial responsibility for the safe management of their products, beginning with the production of feedstock chemicals that fuel the global chemicals sector and the rapidly growing petrochemical industry.

The plan proposes a small coordinated fee of 0.5% on the production value of basic chemicals that will fund the sound management of chemicals and waste. Basic chemicals are early-stage chemicals produced from petroleum, natural gas, and other raw materials. These chemicals represent the basic building blocks from which all other chemicals are made. In 2018, sales of basic chemicals totaled USD 2.3 trillion.

Such a fee places the financial responsibility for chemicals and waste management where it belongs: on the industries profiting from the production of those chemicals. The fee would be collected by the country where the company producing basic chemicals is registered and be paid to a global fund.

The tax would generate approximately eighty-five times the total annual assistance currently flowing to global chemicals management and has the potential to generate sufficient financing for the global sound management of chemicals and waste. Based on 2018 figures, a 0.5% tax on the production value of basic chemicals could raise USD 11.5 billion annually. These funds would support regulatory capacity, infrastructure, information and monitoring systems, and waste management and cleanup systems.

This plan assists countries to implement the polluter pays principle and provides a level playing field for the industry. Further benefits of the plan include that it would use existing domestic regulatory infrastructure to collect the taxes or fees while avoiding the challenges of delegating taxation authority to an international body. It is also in accordance with World Trade Organization law and would not affect consumer pricing.

"Our proposal operationalizes government agreement that the costs of chemical production, use and disposal should be shifted from governments to the private sector," said Joe DiGangi, Senior Science Advisor at IPEN. "If the chemical industry is responsible, it should welcome the opportunity to financially contribute a small 0.5% fee to help governments manage the industry's products."

For additional information, to arrange interviews with the report authors, or for referral to independent 3rd party health and human rights experts for additional comment please contact Laura Vyda, or Cate Bonacini.

CIEL (Center for International Environmental Law) Since 1989, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) has used the power of law to protect the environment, promote human rights, and ensure a just and sustainable society.

IPEN (International Pollutants Elimination Network) is the global environmental network of nearly 600 public interest NGOs in over 125 countries, working to eliminate and reduce the most hazardous substances to forge a toxics-free future for all.

IPEN (International Pollutants Elimination Network) is a global network of public interest organizations improving chemical policies and raising public awareness to ensure that hazardous substances are no longer produced, used, or disposed of in ways that harm human health and the environment. IPEN's Privacy Policy

This blog written by Dr. Andrew Kanter, an Asst. Prof. of Clinical Biomedical Informatics and Epidemiology at Columbia University. He directs the Columbia International eHealth Laboratory. He is also a senior advisor and former Chief Medical Officer for Intelligent Medical Objects, the premier clinical interface terminology company.

The CIEL concept dictionary is a dictionary of over 53 thousand concepts relevant to health information systems in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Those concepts include diagnoses, procedures, medications, labs and observables (answers to questions) all mapped to international standard coding systems such as ICD-10-WHO, SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNORM, and many others. It is used by electronic health records and other health information systems in more than 40 countries.

With the completion of MVP in 2015, CIEL focused the majority of its resources on continuing to support the OpenMRS community, in particular, by expanding the multilingual, multinational standardized concept dictionary from MVP to the global community. MVP required interoperable data collected from the ten different countries in Africa, and CIEL managed this dictionary for the duration of the project. Prior to MVP, OpenMRS had access to a starter dictionary created by Regenstrief and AMPATH, but this dictionary was not being updated. CIEL took in requests for additional concepts from many in the OpenMRS community including Partners in Health, iTECH, Mdecins sans Frontires (MSF), and then made the dictionary available to everyone on a monthly basis via a modified Creative Commons license.

The CIEL concept dictionary was originally provided to the OpenMRS community via a flat file distributed by Dropbox in multiple different versions for the different OpenMRS databases. This required a complete overwriting of the concept tables within the OpenMRS application. This limited the utility of the shared dictionary and created complex implementation pathways. OpenMRS provided a metadata sharing module which allowed packages of concepts to be added to existing implementations, but this too was not ideal.

Dr. Kanter and CIEL collaborated with Jonathan Payne and the Open Concept Lab (OCL) to develop an alternative distribution platform which would allow for cloud-based collaboration on dictionaries, including the CIEL dictionary, and a method of subscribing and updating of a server such as OpenMRS. OCL has now grown to become a multi-purpose terminology management system that many organizations use to publish structured metadata to support health data exchange.

To make implementations easier to build and deploy, OpenMRS supports the ability to copy and customize a CIEL concept instead of recreating it manually. Additionally, OpenMRS has developed the OpenMRS dictionary manager application to give implementers a single place to manage codes. For more details and how to engage more in the OpenMRS Dictionary Manager, checkout the OpenMRS squad that supports the application.

To help implementers and designers better understand concept management and curated dictionaries like CIEL in particular, Dr. Kanter hosts an open CIEL Office Hours on alternating Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8:30pm IST 6pm Nairobi 5pm Cape Town 1pm UTC 10am Boston 7am Seattle. See this talk post for details on how to join: -management-office-hours/31681/6.

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