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The G7 group rotates its chair annually. In 2021, the UK will chair the G7 and the Global Partnership. We thank the USA for finding new ways to engage the GP virtually in 2020 – a truly challenging year! The GP enables partners to work together to mitigate CBRN threats across the CBRN. It brings to the table other like-minded states, International Organisations, including the IAEA, OPCW and WHO. GP members coordinate, fund and implement practical actions to address current and future WMD threats. Our aims for 2021 are:

To promote the GP as a centrepiece of the G7’s international security and counter proliferation efforts.  We will focus on targeted ‘in-reach’ to partners to encourage active engagement. We will seek to secure new or increased financial and non-financial contributions for practical programming initiatives. We will propose wording for the Foreign Ministers’ communique.

Stay focused.  We will prioritise two issues on which to focus our coordination of programming activities. Under Biosecurity we will support and promote the ‘signature initiative’, proposed by Canada, to partner with the Africa Centres for Disease Control (A-CDC) and other African agencies to mitigate biological threats in Africa. This initiative will build on the G7’s 2015 Beyond Ebola Agenda. It aligns with the G7’s 2021 priorities to strengthen health systems while partnering with developing countries.

Nuclear Security remains rightly a matter of high concern to GP partners. Under the UK’s presidency we will reinvigorate the aim of minimising the production and use of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) minimisation. HEU minimisation enjoys broad support but requires more solid political support to achieve greater controls in the real world.

We will take forward the aspiration set by the USA to improve the GP’s capability to fulfil its core mission: to identify, develop, coordinate and implement projects which enhance the partner states’ capability to mitigate the risks of non-state actors acquiring or using WMD.

In the two decades since its establishment at the 2002 Kananaskis Summit, the G7-led Global Partnership (GP) has been the primary international mechanism for co-ordinating Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) threat reduction programmes. The GP continues to address the serious challenges, regionally and globally, from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.