This contribution is part of a MARIPOLDATA blog series on current developments and discussions about the negotiations towards an international legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). In this series, the team publishes updates on the four package items under the BBNJ Agreement which will be concluded in 2021 (Marine Genetic Resources (MGRs), Area Based Management Tools (ABMTs) including Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), Environmental  Impact Assessments (EIAs), and Capacity Building and Technology Transfer (CBTT) from the intersessional online discussions taking place on MS Teams since September 2020, the virtual High Seas Dialogues taking place under Chatham House rules on Webex, and the MARIPOLDATA Ocean Seminar Series in which scholars and practitioners present and discuss current issues of ocean governance.

By Paul Dunshirn and Arne Langlet

Widely used in medicine production: deep-sea sponges

How fair and efficient are governance systems based on proprietary rights and global commons?

Marine genetic resources (MGRs)^[1] are one of the key issues in the ongoing negotiations towards an intergovernmental legally binding instrument on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). In this blog post, we discuss MGRs from a ‘knowledge governance perspective’, focusing on how intellectual property rights (IPRs) and existing access and benefit-sharing (ABS) mechanisms shape ownership and usages of MGRs for the global community of stakeholders. The post sketches out some of the broader implications of this governance setting by drawing parallels to current controversies about the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Throughout both cases, we show how combined attention to both fairness and efficiency of knowledge governance frameworks is necessary for the successful design of international treaties and associated institutions.

Our discussion is largely informed by the recently published MARIPOLDATA publication “Who owns marine biodiversity? Contesting the world order through the ‘common heritage of humankind’ principle” (Vadrot et al., 2021) and the MARIPOLDATA Ocean Seminar webinar from January 27, 2021, with Dr. Konrad Marciniak (Director of the Legal and Treaty Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland).

The high seas and their organisms remain to a large extent unexplored and unknown. From what is known, however, genetic materials of high and deep-sea organisms can play a fundamental role in fighting diseases and conducting economically valuable pharmaceutical research (World Resource Institute; The Maritime Executive). For instance, COVID-19 rapid tests have been developed using materials from deep-sea bacteria. The drug Remdesivir, an antiviral approved as a treatment for Covid-19 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, draws substantially on genetic information extracted from sea sponges (The Maritime Executive).

The current negotiations towards a new BBNJ treaty aim to set rules and strengthen cooperation in researching the High Seas and conserving and sustainably using its biological resources, including MGRs. Introducing such rules and forms of cooperation has become an increasingly important agenda, as the current lack thereof led to conflicts amongst states and other stakeholders in the past (Vadrot et al., 2021). Within the BBNJ, this topic is addressed in the package on MGRs and in discussions about ABS related to these resources.

Most of the value to be gained from MGRs does not lie in the physical samples or the organic materials themselves, but in the scientific knowledge about marine organisms and their genetic makeup. Hence, international governance and cooperation in the context of MGRs is very much a matter of fair and efficient use of knowledge about the oceans – a matter of ‘knowledge governance’ in this sense.

Fairness and Equality in MGR Research

Knowledge about MGRs is politically salient because of its potential economic value and incredibly unequal global distribution (Blasiak et al., 2018). Research into MGRs is costly and requires a high level of investment and scientific capacity – something that only a few countries in the world can afford. It is no secret that “to date, mostly high-income countries have had the financial and other relevant capacities required to conduct marine genetic research and commercial activity associated with the ocean genome” (World Resource Institute). However, the “exploration and sampling of the ocean genome are often conducted in low- or middle-income countries’ ocean territories”, or in ABNJ under no country’s jurisdiction (World Resource Institute). Most countries “lack the resources to undertake the research themselves or to access and use the rapidly growing databases of genetic sequence data” (World Resource Institute). This lack of resources and infrastructures for exploring marine biodiversity has caused a global gap in research (Tolochko & Vadrot, 2021) and the issuing of patents covering MGRs (Blasiak et al., 2018). Exemplifying this, research has demonstrated that 47% of globally registered patents on marine genetic sequences are held by one German company alone (BASF), and 98% of all patent sequences belong to actors in 10 countries, with 165 countries holding none (Blasiak et al., 2018).

Some academics assess the practice of patenting MGRs as contributing to a trend towards more and more exclusive property rights to valuable ocean resources (e.g. Schlüter et al., 2020). Unsurprisingly, countries that cannot participate in this process are highly critical of how these knowledge resources (which may reasonably be considered as global common goods) are made artificially scarce and exclusive through this current lack of a clear governance regime. Thus, demands for more global equality have taken a central role in debates related to the MGR chapter in the BBNJ negotiations (Vadrot et al., 2021). Developing countries have proposed to declare MGRs as Common Heritage of Humankind, which has caused heated arguments throughout the negotiation rounds without any hint to compromise. In his MARIPOLDATA Ocean Seminar presentation, Dr. Konrad Marciniak pointed out that the legal interpretation regarding the opposition between the Common Heritage of Humankind Principle and the Freedom of the High Seas Principle currently remains unclear (Marciniak, 2017, 2020)^[2]. Developing countries have argued that the absence of a clear legal interpretation contributes to existing disparities between the global North and South, to the extent that the successful negotiation of the BBNJ agreement hinges on the question of MGRs. In this context, some countries loudly question the global economic order and its fairness (Vadrot et al., 2021).

Efficiency and a Strong Access and Benefit Sharing System

Highly complex ABS systems that are internationally enforced may, however, run the risk of being inefficient. MARIPOLDATA’s observations of the BBNJ negotiations about MGRs show that developing countries favour a strict and enforceable ABS system for MGRs from ABNJ. For instance, the group of Latin American countries (CLAM) proposes a strict tracing of digital sequences through a unique identifier. CLAM sees this as the only way to ensure an effective governance system. To institutionalize this, they propose a mandatory, open, and self-declaratory electronic system in the Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM). This would mean that the CHM includes information on every sample of MGRs taken from ABNJ, filing a unique identifier per sample (and of genetic variants).

An ABS system can only be efficient if it is accepted and used by the scientific community. Representatives of scientific organizations have publicly voiced concerns over a potential ‘over-bureaucratization’ of research that the establishment of new “super” databases and the monetization of access to samples would entail. If all MGRs samples collected from ABNJ need to be registered and identified by the CHM, this may introduce considerable administrative burdens (Rabone et al., 2019). The Nagoya Protocol, which established a rather rigid ABS system, is often cited as a negative example, as it has complicated the access to genetic samples (from land and national waters). In this regard, many researchers stress the substantial difference and intensity of work that lies between biodiversity sampling and the creation of patentable biotechnologies. This ‘gap’ “may have been overlooked during the negotiations and subsequent implementation of the Nagoya Protocol, resulting in an ABS system that often comes at the expense of research for knowledge and conservation” (Arnaud-Haond, 2020, p. 29). Such a system could increase fairness but at the expense of making research inefficient and more complicated.

The argument for IPRs, in particular patents, is that they encourage innovation and safeguard investment in research and development (Posner & Landes, 2003) while being an efficient – market-driven governance tool. The IPR approach is assumed to be efficient because researchers look for property right protection on their own initiative, which in turn assures them the protection of their scientific advancements and secures necessary funding. Hence, IPRs are argued to incentivize scientific research. This has been voiced by many states in the BBNJ negotiations (USA, EU, Japan) that highlight that the conduct and freedom of marine scientific research are paramount to the new agreement.

The efficiency argument for IPRs, however, has become increasingly criticized in recent years. A variety of studies (Baker, Jayadev, & Stiglitz, 2017; Benkler, 2004; Stiglitz, 2006) have shown that an IPRs approach does not necessarily increase innovation but may actually slow it down and increase research costs by forcing researchers to negotiate licensing fees with holders of related patents. Patents are indicated to be responsible for higher prices and monopolies (Benkler, 2004; Heller & Eisenberg, 1998).

Fairness and Efficiency in the context of COVID-19 vaccines

The trend towards more and more exclusive or privatized IPR regimes in the governance of knowledge resources not only takes place in the context of MGRs, but also shapes current controversies about the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. In this section, we discuss some of these parallels to clarify the importance of critically evaluating knowledge governance regimes in terms of their efficiency and fairness.

Is the Proprietary Approach to Vaccine Development fair?

The COVID-19 pandemic has cost millions of lives, crippled the economy across the globe, and caused the delay of the BBNJ negotiations, as the fourth and final Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) had to be postponed. Currently, the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines is a reason for hope (also for the next BBNJ IGC scheduled for August in New York), but also bears potential for conflict. Once again, global inequalities in access to vaccines are widely discussed in many intergovernmental institutions (The Economist; Fortune; UN). Tendencies for countries to prioritize their own access has led to what the new head of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has called – ‘vaccine nationalism’ (BBC; Gostin, 2020). Sources estimate that some African countries may receive doses of COVID-19 vaccines only by 2023 (The Economist). Some observers have linked this disparity in access to vaccines to how developed countries have successfully enforced patent protection on vaccines (New York Times). The chief of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has stated that “even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots” (UN). This observation has not only been heavily discussed within the WHO, but also in many big news outlets (The Economist; Fortune; New York Times), as well as amongst state representatives, health professionals (The Lancet), and NGOs (Médecins Sans Frontières).

This fear is largely triggered by the observed mismatch between demand and supply from the companies licensed to produce the vaccine. There is almost universal demand, but the supply currently does not suffice to even quickly vaccinate substantial parts of the population in wealthy developed countries. It appears that this mismatch is caused by the fact that vaccines against COVID-19 are subject to patents, which means that the vaccine cannot be freely reproduced (Hensher et al., 2020). The companies holding the patents (and knowledge over the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) that are necessary to produce the serum) have the exclusive right to produce and sell the vaccine. This situation is causing increased criticism of the current practice of licensing and patenting under which the pharmaceutical companies holding the patents (and knowledge over the SOP) occupy a powerful monopolist position. Critics accuse pharmaceutical companies of abusing their monopolist position  – of “choosing profits over human lives” (Zeit).

The fact that a small number of private companies hold patents over these vaccines is questionable, particularly because large amounts of public funding have flown into their research and development. The US has poured an estimated 10.5 billion $ into the research of COVID-19 vaccines (Scientific American). The Moderna vaccine emerged out of a cooperation between the company and the National Institutes of Health in the US (NIH). The EU and its Member States invested 9.8 € billion, out of which 1.4 € billion came directly from the European Commission. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine received substantial funding in its development phase from the EU and German public sources (European Investment Bank). AstraZeneca also holds exclusive licenses with no commitment to public access for publicly funded vaccines developed by Oxford University’s Jenner Institute (Hensher et al., 2020). The BBC estimates that public funding substantially supported the research that produced current COVID-19 vaccines. Without heavy public funding, the vaccines would likely not have been developed by now. However, these public investments have not precluded companies from adopting exclusive patenting practices.

This proprietary approach to vaccine development (i.e. an approach that focuses on establishing exclusive patents on pharmaceutical processes and products) has come under fire from different sides. A group of socialist EU lawmakers sent a letter to the European Commission urging the EU executive to explore ways of suspending patents for COVID-19 vaccines, calling it a “moral imperative”. Greece had proposed to the EU member states to jointly buy the patent rights for the COVID-19 vaccine – hence to communalize the patents (Reuters).

References

Arnaud-Haond, S. (2020). Mind the Gap between Biological Samples and Marine Genetic Resources in Areas beyond National Jurisdiction: Lessons from Land. In New Knowledge and Changing Circumstances in the Law of the Sea (pp. 29-39): Brill Nijhoff.

Baker, D., Jayadev, A., & Stiglitz, J. E. (2017). Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Development. Retrieved from https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/baker-jayadev-stiglitz-innovation-ip-development-2017-07.pdf

Benkler, Y. (2004). Commons-based strategies and the problems of patents. In: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Blasiak, R., Jouffray, J.-B., Wabnitz, C. C. C., Sundström, E., & Österblom, H. (2018). Corporate control and global governance of marine genetic resources. Science Advances, 4(6), eaar5237. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aar5237

Bonadio, E., & Baldini, A. (2020). COVID-19, patents and the never-ending tension between proprietary rights and the protection of public health. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 11(2), 390-395.

Gostin, L. O., Karim, S. A., & Mason Meier, B. (2020). Facilitating access to a COVID-19 vaccine through global health law. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 48(3), 622-626.

Heller, M. A., & Eisenberg, R. S. (1998). Can patents deter innovation? The anticommons in biomedical research. Science, 280(5364), 698-701.

Hensher, M., Kish, K., Farley, J., Quilley, S., & Zywert, K. (2020). Open knowledge commons versus privatized gain in a fractured information ecology: Lessons from COVID-19 for the future of sustainability. Global Sustainability, 3.

Marciniak, K. (2017). Marine Genetic Resources: Do They Form Part of the Common Heritage of Mankind Principle? In C. S. L. Martin, C. Hioureas (Ed.), Natural Resources and the Law of the Sea: Exploration, Allocation, Exploitation of Natural Resources in Areas under National Jurisdiction and Beyond (pp. 373-406).

Marciniak, K. (2020). The Legal Status of Marine Genetic Resources in the Context of BBNJ Negotiations: Diverse Legal Regimes and Related Problems. In New Knowledge and Changing Circumstances in the Law of the Sea (pp. 40-64): Brill Nijhoff.

Posner, R., & Landes, W. (2003). The economic structure of intellectual property law. Harvard University Press.

Rabone, M., Harden-Davies, H., Collins, J., Zajderman, S., Appeltans, W., Droege, G., . . . Horton, T. (2019). Access to Marine Genetic Resources (MGR): Raising Awareness of Best-Practice Through a New Agreement for Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ). Frontiers in Marine Science, 6, 520. doi:10.3389/fmars.2019.00520.

Schlüter, A., Bavinck, M., Hadjimichael, M., Partelow, S., Said, A., & Ertör, I. (2020). Broadening the perspective on ocean privatizations: an interdisciplinary social science enquiry. Ecology and Society, 25(3).

Stiglitz, J. E. (2006). Making globalization work. London: Allen Lane.

Tolochko, P., & Vadrot, A. B. (2021). The usual suspects? Distribution of collaboration capital in marine biodiversity research. Marine Policy, 124, 104318.

Vadrot, A., Langlet, A., Tessnow von Wysocki, I. (2021). Who owns marine biodiversity? Contesting the world order through the ‘common heritage of humankind’ principle. Environmental politics.

Read more

The United Nations are currently negotiating a new Agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). This agreement seeks to regulate the access to and sharing of benefits from marine genetic resources (MGRs), to establish area-based management tools (ABMTs), including marine protected areas (MPAs) on the High Seas, to assess the impact of activities on the marine environment through environmental impact assessments (EIAs), and to strengthen marine scientific research and guarantee capacity building and technology transfer (CB&TT). The recently published article “The Voice of Science on Marine Biodiversity Negotiations: A systematic Literature review” by Ina Tessnow-von Wysocki and Alice Vadrot informs international ocean governance by untangling the complex BBNJ negotiations, highlighting the policy relevance of existing work, and facilitating links between science, policy, and practice.

Science and Knowledge on Marine Biodiversity Negotiations

Photo credits: Ines Alvarez on Unsplash

Oftentimes, it is expected that international policy-decisions are based on the “best available science and knowledge”,  especially when areas and resources at stake are “global commons” and belong to no one and everyone at the same time. This is the case with the ocean, where state governments are currently negotiating about the future of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. But what is meant by such “best available science and knowledge” remains undefined. Various stakeholders are valuing different forms of knowledge and grant science and knowledge of different powers regarding decision-making about activities on the High Seas. Most people agree that regulating the ocean should be based on sound knowledge, retrieved by scientific methods, and approved through peer-review of other scientists before publication. Increasingly, there are calls to integrate other forms of knowledge, including traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, and local knowledge of practitioners, civil society and the private sector.

The interdisciplinary and international team of the ERC project MARIPOLDATA researches the role of science in the BBNJ negotiations through a multi- and mixed-method approach, using event ethnography at the intergovernmental conferences to collect qualitative and quantitative data, as well as bibliometric data, combined with network analysis and oral history interviews. In this way, the team maps existing marine biodiversity research and identifies collaborations on the global scale, explores the different scientific capacities of state actors in the negotiations and studies the authority of existing intergovernmental organisations within the BBNJ regime complex, portrays differences in state positions regarding key BBNJ issues and looks at case studies of specific regions within the BBNJ context. One key pillar of the MARIPOLDATA project is researching how science and knowledge influence the treaty-making process and how science-policy interrelations can be improved at different policy-making stages.

In this regard, the recently published systematic literature review serves as an up-to-date summary and analysis of scientific publications on the BBNJ process, compiling main priority topics and recommendations from 140 multidisciplinary, geographically diverse publications. Our literature review focuses on the peer-reviewed scientific findings that scholars have published on the BBNJ process. To find out what the scientific community writes about the BBNJ Agreement, we were interested in the questions: Which issues are prioritized in BBNJ research and the academic debate? Which best practices were identified and discussed in the literature that can serve as guiding principles and approaches? And what is currently missing in the debate about the future regulatory framework to protect and sustainably use marine biodiversity?

At the moment, the ongoing BBNJ negotiations have been indefinitely postponed due to the COVID-19 measures around the globe. However, informal and semi-formal online discussions continue to take place, in the form of “High Seas Online Dialogue”, organized by certain state and non-state actors, and Intersessional Work – an online platform- organized by the UN Secretariat to keep the momentum and progress towards consensus.

The time is now to approach policy-makers with the most recent scientific findings on BBNJ. At the same time, final decisions about the future of the ocean and marine biodiversity have still not been made. Within this intersessional period, there is the opportunity for recent scientific findings on BBNJ to make their way to the policy-makers’ negotiating table, and – by being put into context – to be perceived as politically relevant to be taken into consideration when negotiating the next (final) BBNJ round. In this regard, our literature review serves as a tool to untangle the complex BBNJ issues for newcomers in the field. It gives an overview of all existing work on BBNJ since the early beginnings of the process and provides insights on the latest scientific findings relevant to BBNJ.

The wave of Scientific Literature published along the BBNJ pathway

Photo credits: Lysander Yuen on Unsplash

The BBNJ process started in 2006 with the first meetings of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Informal Working Group and transitioned into Preparatory Committee meetings, and finally, formal negotiations – the intergovernmental conferences, taking place in the New York UN Headquarters since 2018, which are supposed to end with the next upcoming IGC-4.

Throughout the BBNJ process, there have been many academic contributions regarding the process in the form of new scientific findings, case studies, geospatial analyses, and law reviews by authors from multiple disciplines, including oceanography, marine biology, conservation science, political science, and law. Publications on BBNJ issues and the number of new authors in this field have been growing throughout the process.

There is often little time to go through hundreds and hundreds of scientific publications, many of which are often only accessible with certain rights for academic journals and written in scientific jargon of the particular discipline. We, therefore, provide a timely overview of what is “out there” of findings, analyses, studies, and recommendations for the new agreement and critically reflect on this corpus of literature – a review intended for researchers from diverse academic disciplines in the natural and social sciences, policy-makers, and practitioners. The systematic literature review serves to capture all academic publications related to the BBNJ Treaty from the database “Web of Science,” complemented using the snowball method to include additional sources from reference lists of relevant publications[1]. The sample includes all publications referring to the BBNJ negotiations or directly relevant to the BBNJ process – since before the official start of BBNJ meetings in 2004 until 2020. More recently published articles were not analyzed in detail but mentioned in the discussion section of the review to ensure timeliness and policy-relevance for the upcoming – and planned to be last – intergovernmental conference. We observe a high increase in BBNJ publications in 2014 with a special issue on this topic, as well as a general growing BBNJ literature starting from the beginning of the Preparatory Committee in 2016. The analysis ends in May 2020, but there have been many contributions in the second half of 2020, which is expected to continue with ongoing BBNJ online discussions until the next conference and beyond.

Scientific Publications along the BBNJ Pathway

A large amount of the scientific literature we analyzed aims to directly inform the BBNJ agreement by identifying areas in need of protection, outlining consequences of certain activities on the marine environment, pointing to best practice examples and lessons learned from past experiences with international implementing agreements of UNCLOS, or other international and regional frameworks seeking to conserve or sustainably use marine species or genetic resources. Therefore, such a review is critically relevant to consider for researchers studying BBNJ, state representatives forming their positions in the negotiations, and non-state actors and civil society being involved in the process. The academic literature is valuable for scientists to make a connection to their research, serves as a knowledge base on BBNJ and is significant for policy-makers to make informed decisions about how to regulate, use and protect the marine environment for current and future generations, as well as for planet Earth in its own right.

The Voice of Science is calling

The review presents recommendations made in the scientific literature sample for each of the four package elements of the future treaty. It first examines the main challenges facing the current ocean governance framework identified in the literature and potential solutions offered by the package elements. Second, it provides for each of the BBNJ package elements: a) a compilation of scientific findings and identified priority areas, b) suggested guiding principles, approaches, and recommendations, c) references to existing law, d) best-practice examples and lessons learned and e) recommended institutional entities for implementation. Further, our review elaborates on overarching topics across package elements named by BBNJ authors, which need to be considered in the negotiations if objectives for conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity are to be met. These include ocean connectivity, the relationship between BBNJ and existing instruments, institutional design; the role of science in BBNJ; and digital technology.

Beyond the BBNJ package elements

Scientists from a range of disciplines writing on BBNJ issues agree: the ocean is one. Numerous interconnections have to be accounted for when discussing the exploitation of marine genetic resources, the establishment of marine protected areas and the assessment of environmental impacts. BBNJ authors explain different forms of ocean connectivity and its relevance to the BBNJ negotiations. Human activities can significantly harm marine species and whole ecosystems, but listening to science could prevent major harm. While the BBNJ scientific community is diverse, scientists consensually agree that the marine environment needs to be dealt with in precaution and be managed holistically, as a connected system. This recognizes that activity in one place of the ocean (e.g. fishing in the water column) can negatively impact other parts where the link might not be immediately obvious (e.g. impacts on the marine biodiversity on the seafloor). Also, the ocean and the climate are interlinked, meaning that changes in the marine environment can be triggered by the climate and major variation in ocean cycles can result in changes in the global climate.

Significant discussions in the literature regard how the new instrument will interplay with existing instruments and the composition of the new BBNJ instrument with its internal arrangements. The literature provides an explanation of the three institutional models that have been envisaged for BBNJ within existing mechanisms and organisations, namely Regional, Hybrid and Global and analyses specific examples of relationships between BBNJ and existing instruments. One part of the BBNJ authors provides analyses of possible institutional arrangements, including a Conference of the Parties (COP), a Scientific and Technical Body, a clearing-house mechanism (CHM), and a financial mechanism, as well as provide ideas for implementation and compliance of the agreement.

Science plays a crucial role in all BBNJ package elements. Knowledge on the ocean and its ecosystems is necessary to understand the world’s ecosystems and use the ocean’s resources for product development in the pharmaceutical, biofuel, and chemical industries and to protect marine biodiversity. Some BBNJ authors emphasize the need for scientific cooperation in BBNJ, coupled with capacity building and marine technology transfer. There seems to be a general agreement that science is needed in the decision-making process. Still, there is no universal definition of the knowledge forms and no consensus on what tasks and powers would be appropriate for a scientific and technical body. Some BBNJ authors provide best practice examples and lessons learnt from existing science-policy interfaces in ocean governance institutions.

Another part of the BBNJ literature regards the overarching theme “digital technology”. It is identified as important to develop products from MGRs using digital sequence data. Moreover, it also contributes to the conservation of species through understanding migratory routes. Satellite data can support the identification of mobile MPAs, as suggested recently by some BBNJ authors.

Furthermore, monitoring, control and surveillance measures can significantly be improved through automatic identification system (AIS) which uses satellites to transmit real-time data of fishing vessels’ location. Such technology is particularly helpful in ABNJ, as these areas are largely remote and not easily accessible for physical monitoring. The NGO Global Fishing Watch is using such technology to track global fishing activities in real-time.

Photo credits: Global Fishing Watch

Will BBNJ blow a wind of change against the stormy sea?

As responsible policy-makers, researchers, civil society actors and parts of the private sector- with this knowledge – we can no longer continue the “business as usual” but need to be open to alternative forms of living in harmony with nature. Based on the review, we identify two important gaps in the BBNJ literature that need to be addressed if we are to conserve marine biodiversity in international waters: the science-policy interfaces and the need for transformative change.

The need to consider science in the ongoing BBNJ negotiations to conserve and sustainably use the ocean effectively does not seem to be disputed by many, however, how such interaction between science and policy takes place is not sufficiently studied. Ways through which science and knowledge reach policy-makers and under what conditions such findings impact the negotiations are yet to be identified. Formalized processes are required to guide the integration of science and other forms of knowledge, including local and traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Moreover, an independent expert body for BBNJ, which is currently discussed at the BBNJ negotiations, is necessary to implement the treaty’s targets successfully.

Need for transformative change

To understand the roots of the anthropogenic threats to the ocean, social, political and economic factors need to be considered. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recognized that biodiversity loss could only be reversed by introducing transformative change into our societies. Such debate is not (yet?) visible in the BBNJ context, but is important to reflect on when seeking to conserve and sustainably use the ocean. Existing economic, political and social structures have led to the dramatic state in which the ocean is now. Reversing such damage, thus, requires to re-think the “business as usual” and imagine alternatives.

There is a need to uncover the politics behind tensions in the negotiations, including competing environmental values and legitimate knowledge. In the light of negotiating global commons, we need to examine if the existing structures ensure adequate representation of the international community and consider the idea to represent future generations and nature in itself. With our critical view on the corpus of BBNJ literature and the identification of gaps, we encourage to develop ideas and ways forward – without taking the “business as usual” within existing political, economic and social boundaries as a given – and to think beyond such structures for creating new regulations for marine biodiversity that serves all of humanity and contributes to a healthy ocean for its own right.

Open Access to full article: Tessnow-von Wysocki, I. and Vadrot, A. 2020. The Voice of Science on Marine Biodiversity Negotiations: A Systematic Literature Review. Frontiers in Marine Science 7: 614282.

Past MARIPOLDATA blogs about the BBNJ negotiations:

Key findings from our study of the marine biodiversity field and why our data matters for the new BBNJ treaty by Alice Vadrot and Petro Tolochko, December 22, 2020

Slow progress in the third BBNJ meeting: Negotiations are moving – but sideways, by Ina Tessnow-von Wysocki on September 6, 2019

Setting the stage for the common heritage of humankind principle: Diving into further negotiations on a new marine biodiversity treaty, by Alice Vadrot, Ina Tessnow-von Wysocki and Arne Langlet on August 28, 2019

Impressions from the second week of BBNJ negotiations and why they became political in the end, by Alice Vadrot and Arne Langlet on April 15, 2019

Peter Jacques

On the 11th of March, the MARIPOLDATA team welcomed one of its international advisory network members: Doctor Peter Jacques from the University of Central Florida in Orlando (USA). He has a PhD in Political Science with a focus on the connection between environmental policy and foreign policy; and he is an expert in sustainability with specific experience in climate change policy, fisheries, and international marine policy. Some of his current research projects include the study of denial of climate change and its connections to western ideals of progress, the international regulation of ocean pollution and fisheries.

Marine biodiversity science is central for current efforts to establish a new treaty for the protection and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). However, for a long time, a lack of scientific knowledge on the ocean was conceived as the main challenge for advancing efforts to protect ocean ecosystems. Nowadays the field is evolving quickly. New initiatives such as the Census of Marine Life or the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) contributed to the rise of new data and a deeper understanding of the marine world and of its different components.

In order to understand how science has shaped international efforts to protect marine biodiversity, the MARIPOLDATA project combines the empirical study of international negotiations with a systematic analysis of the development and characteristics of the scientific field. Examining the role of science in international negotiations enables us to study and observe the role of science in the making of a new treaty and to shed light on how scientific capital influences the preferences of governments on how marine biodiversity ought to be protected, shared and sustainably used.

To this end, MARIPOLDATA (WP2) develops a large database of scientific publications related to marine biodiversity, analyzing the content of the publications, as well as international collaboration patterns in the discipline. The current blog serves as the first foray into our results and can be accessed here:

With this interactive entry, we show how the field of marine biodiversity has been evolving in the past 30 years in terms of content. Marine biodiversity can be defined as “an aggregation of highly interconnected ecosystem components or features, encompassing all levels of biological organization from genes, species, populations to ecosystems […]” (Cochrane et al. 2017).The interactive dashboard allows to dive deeper into this aggregation and the different aspects covered by the concept. The dashboard is designed to show what has been written about marine biodiversity, more specifically what keywords authors use, when writing scientific publications in the field, and how the keywords are related to each other. Since the field of marine biodiversity is a rather diverse in and of itself, this visualization allows to trace the patterns of keywords and the scope of the discipline, which was continuously increasing in the last 30 years.

This visualization is based on 26.000 scientific abstracts from 1990 until 2019 (retrieved from Web of Science), and you can choose any year within this time period to see whether the keywords, or their patterns of co-occurrence have changed over time. The keywords are connected if they appear, or “co-occur” in the same abstract. By default, the visualization shows the top (highest frequency) 100 keyword pairs from the selected year, but you can select to show top 50 to top 750 pairs.

The interactive dashboard will evolve over time with more functionality and more interesting data added. We will keep you posted.

Link to the dashboard: https://maripoldata.shinyapps.io/keywords_shiny/

(Note: the colors are mainly for aesthetic reasons and should not be over interpreted.)