Traceability Approaches for Marine Genetic Resources Under the Proposed Ocean (BBNJ) Treaty

Abstract

Negotiations are underway for a new treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Points of contention in the negotiation concern marine genetic resources and questions of monetary and/or non-monetary benefit sharing arising from their use. Tracing the origin of marine genetic resources used in scientific research, development and commercialization may offer the evidence needed to prove they came from areas beyond national jurisdiction and that benefit sharing is owed. Traceability is complex and multidisciplinary: involving legal, scientific and informatics considerations. We look at different traceability approaches within national jurisdictions and how these might provide lessons for the proposed treaty, using one of the few case studies available to trace the commercial development of a marine genetic resource from areas beyond national jurisdiction. We discuss this case study in relation to existing legal frameworks including the Nagoya Protocol and other systems based on open sharing of information and materials, including existing scientific practice. We conclude that a well-designed traceability system tailored to the unique geographical, political and jurisdictional characteristics of areas beyond national jurisdiction could lead to more equitable outcomes for the sharing of benefits from the use of marine genetic resources. Our key recommendations are that any traceability mechanism needs to be light touch, integrated with existing systems such as bioinformatics databases and not impose additional burdens on scientific users. Systems should be designed to improve scientific knowledge of ocean biodiversity to allow better conservation measures to be developed. If treaty negotiators engage commercial sectors to find workable policy solutions for the draft treaty that promote greater transparency and data sharing from these sectors, there may be a greater chance for traceability mechanisms to support benefit sharing.

A review of the International Seabed Authority database DeepData: challenges and opportunities in the UN Ocean Decade

“…occurrenceID) may be used by some institutes as catalogNumber. However, many collection institutes have a different code (sometimes human readable) and these are used as an internal institutional identifier including on physical specimen labels (Rabone et al,in prep;43). In the ISA DwC mapping guidance, SampleID has been mapped to occurrenceID, and VoucherCode has been mapped to catalogNumber (S File 5A, B) but this is a misinterpretation of the terms, rather SampleID maps to catalogNumber, and VoucherCode could be mapped to either DwC term otherCatalogNumber or recordNumber (Figure 4).…”

(Un)claiming rights, resources, and ocean spaces: Marine genetic resources and area-based management tools in high seas governance negotiations

“…Yet the pathway to identifying these products is long, risky, and speculative. There are also practical challenges to traceability, and it is currently unknown to what extent these commercial products incorporate MGRs of ABNJ (Humphries et al, 2021). Absent certainty in the applicable legal regimes, there is a risk that realizing the benefits of these resources for humankind will be impracticable (Tiller et al, 2020).…”

“…However, the Nagoya Protocol does not extend to ABNJ, where no state has sovereign control (Blasiak, 2019). Instead, the default regime remains FHSP and a first-come first-served approach whereby property rights of both the material and genetic resources are established by possession (Humphries et al, 2021; Vadrot et al, 2021). Additionally, the traceability regimes of the Nagoya protocol may give rise to competing claims to resources harvested in ABNJ among the state of the flag vessel, states through which MGRs transit, and the state in which the MGRs are ultimately landed (Humphries et al, 2021).…”

“…However, under the status quo, if the organism crosses into ABNJ, private actors can freely collect and utilize it (Thambisetty, 2018). Competing claims to benefits may arise based on the subsequent movement of the resource by those who collect and use it (Humphries et al, 2021), as opposed to the movement of the organism during its life. Thus, even if an organism spends most of its life cycle within state waters, the state may gain no benefit from the resource if it is collected in ABNJ, regardless of how temporary or transient its presence in ABNJ is.…”

ChatBBNJ: a question–answering system for acquiring knowledge on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction

“…LLMs are trained on general corpora, such as Common Crawl (Common Crawl, 2023) and Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2023). BBNJ-related knowledge is complex and multidisciplinary, involving legal, scientific, and international relations considerations (Humphries et al, 2021). These specialized areas differ significantly from the pre-trained data of LLMs.…”