Encouraging proactive governance of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction through Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA)

The Need for a Global Ocean Vision Within Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction: A Key Role for Strategic Environmental Assessment

“…With such an approach SEA becomes a process for driving the decisionmaking process and institutional change. Use of strategy-based SEA has been advocated in the context of the Convention for Biodiversity Sustainable Ocean Initiative (CBD/SOI, n.d.) and within the BBNJ agreement/negotiations, to promote cooperation and conservation (e.g., Doelle & Sander, 2020;Hassanali and Mahon, 2022;WWF, 2019;Hills, 2020). WWF (2019) suggested that States should be required to conduct a 'collective' SEA, which would act as a warrant of environmental oversight and as an "exercise in 'enhanced cooperation '", and Hill (2020, p. 27), reporting on the results of a 2020 EC workshop on EIAs and SEAs in ABNJ, noted 'the need to harmonise processes to create a cooperative and integrated approach' .…”

“…WWF (2019) suggested that States should be required to conduct a 'collective' SEA, which would act as a warrant of environmental oversight and as an "exercise in 'enhanced cooperation '", and Hill (2020, p. 27), reporting on the results of a 2020 EC workshop on EIAs and SEAs in ABNJ, noted 'the need to harmonise processes to create a cooperative and integrated approach' . Doelle & Sander (2020) listed the basic building blocks of next generation environmental assessments (including SEA) that need to be in place under Hassanali and Mahon (2022) detailed the components of a proactive process for conservation of BBNJ with an SEA track informing subsequent region-specific policies and plans (including MSP).…”

Governing a Divided Ocean: The Transformative Power of Ecological Connectivity in the BBNJ negotiations

“…Conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity, thus, requires cross-jurisdictional governance and coordination among different bodies responsible for certain regions or sectors in both areas within and beyond national jurisdiction. This implies the need for an effects-based approach to EIAs and strategic environmental assessments, which considers cumulative and transboundary impacts (Hassanali & Mahon, 2022). MGRs with the same genetic material can be found in areas within and beyond national jurisdiction, which calls for a coherent legal framework for the access to and sharing of benefits from MGRs.…”

Direction, not detail: Progress towards consensus at the fourth intergovernmental conference on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction

“…Most delegates agreed that the trigger, if anything, should be the level of potential impact and not the type of activity. Because of the “should not undermine” proviso in the mandate of the negotiations, it is generally understood that activities with pre-existing governance regimes, such as fishing and seabed mining in the Area, would not be subject to new EIA processes [17] , [2] . Among the countries that were interested in establishing an objective trigger for EIAs, the question revolved around what that trigger should look like and whether there should be only one trigger or if a tiered approach of some kind was needed to account for special circumstances.…”

“…Others emphasized that COP guidance should support state-led decision-making on EIAs. All of these dividing lines pre-date IGC-4 [16] , [17] [ 8 ], yet there was a general lack of progress as delegates failed to get any closer to a broadly accepted solution for EIA triggers or the role of the STB.…”