High Seas Treaty: Marine Protected Areas & ABMTs

[00:00:03]ladies and gentlemen warm welcome to all of you and um good morning good afternoon good evening good night depending on where in the world you are it's a pleasure for me to invite you to this very exciting new webinar today we're going to talk about area-based management tools and marine protected areas in the context of the new treaty to manage biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction to do that we have a very exciting and competent group of people who will be speaking for us and what i'll do is i'll introduce them one at a time before their presentations and then the two panelists are also going to join us for this final question and answer session the idea behind these seminars is really to give people an opportunity to better understand where are we when it comes to the treaty and the different parts to it so this is the third one in the series which we're doing the first one was on genet um genetic resources the second one was on um environmental impact assessment and then this third one is on on mpas and abm teas so the intent for us is really to give you an opportunity to ask questions so already now if you have burning questions you're interested in feel free to look at the question panel and put in your questions and you'll be able to get us to consider those and we'll try to manage as many as we can and we have about 45 minutes to run these questions so hopefully we will be able to address as many as possible and for those of you who might not get a chance to get their questions answers please feel free also to give us feedback we will send out a link to this recording and we will also have an opportunity to give you a feedback form that you can give some suggestions for potential future uh webinars we're also intending to have a fourth session which will cover the the topic of financial mechanism capacity building and institutional issues depending a little bit on demand we might do additional ones apart from these and perhaps do those a little bit closer to the next round of negotiation which is now scheduled to happen beginning of january so today um all of us i think are have heard about the whole idea that we should be protecting 30 percent of the world ocean and finding a mechanism for doing that because when we're dealing with the high seas these are very large areas currently we don't have so many cases but we will hear from a couple of these cases here of how we're trying to go about doing this conservation but in order to give a bit of a framework if one would address these type of issues i'm very very happy to introduce to you apart from that she's also a great fun person to to talk to and someone who really is easy to to um to understand when it comes to you know the insights about how do we go about structuring this treaty now beyond that she's also uh working in um with the um um deep ocean stewardship initiative dosi which is a co-organizer of this as well as the global ocean biodiversity initiative the sargasso sea project and the high seas alliance um and recently she also became a member of the executive planning group for the un decade of ocean so christina will fill us in on the treaty and give us a bit of a sense of you know where are we going with these things and how how should we think about the topics related to area based management tools christina the floor is yours you're still muted christina we need you unmuted as well sorry okay are you seeing the presentation yes okay not not yet the presentation we just see you right now i have not gotten a share screen request okay sorry about that well we're waiting for this i will say good morning good afternoon and good evening to everybody and thank you very much for joining us okay i think we should be on board now that's let me know when you can see the screen yes we can see your screen now you're ready to go lovely okay so um it's my pleasure to try to give a oversight a 30 000 ft oversight of where we are today in terms of negotiating this new treaty for areas beyond national jurisdiction what i'm trying to do is to bring us up all up onto a level playing field with respect to opportunities and challenges in moving beyond our current status quo for those who are new to this we call it sometimes the bbnj treaty this is the shorthand for the un treaty on the conservation sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction and um the focus has been for many of us on how do you better implement the principles and obligations set forth in the u.n convention on the law of the sea including of course the general obligation to protect and preserve the marine environment to protect observe rare and fragile ecosystems and habitats of species and to cooperate on a global and regional basis but we're also finding that as the world expands in terms of populations stressors and climate change that we may also need to evolve to confront current and future challenges now so where we are today excuse me is in a draft agreement the president issued in november that's containing 12 parts and part 3 is on area-based management tools including marine protected areas that's not to say the other parts are less important they're just not our focus today but they include on marine genetic resources environmental impact assessments and capacity building as well as larger questions about financial institutions and general principles and approaches so here we are the the steps going through what are it is in the treaty to date outline definitions in part one and then skipping to part three you have the objectives 15 international cooperation coordination on down and up and around to monitoring and review these are the classic stages for an mta proposal within national jurisdiction and now we're also trying to address the challenge of other area-based management tools so i'm fortunate to be able to build off the results of many mines coming together in glon last october that's where we're able to brainstorm where are we today and where might we want to go in the future you'll be hearing from of course guillermo artunia crossbar and david freestone and um okay um jimenez a little bit about the real on the ground case studies about tools technologies and places that we're actually trying to come to grapple with in this new treaty so the title which we chose as sort of the conclusion is it's time to build ambition broaden participation and plan ahead and how we might do that is what i'm going to try to talk in these three sections today is future proofing starts with definitions and objectives specifically for marine protected areas as well as other area-based management tools uh two steps for enhancing cooperation coordination and action i think we really need to be looking towards implementation mechanisms and then ten steps for future proving this draft bbnj treaty to deal with the challenges of the future so what is a marine protected area and why is this important well as you can see the dark blue in the corner it talks about this is an iucn standard that has been applied to marine protected areas around the world to provide a uniform definition and tracking and tracing of progress as we try to move beyond that 10 target that governments agreed in 2002 but the main point here is that the essential characteristics that an mpa needs to have to be an mpa globally is the conservation focused with nature as priority that with a management plan and the resources and capacity to effectively implement it but what it means in practice is that conservation is the primary objective sustainable use is what you're trying to do outside and i think it's building on decades of experience also in the convention on biological diversity whereas in 1992 they already realized that you needed to elaborate what does it actually mean to protect and preserve the marine environment what does it mean to conserve and sustain marine biodiversity and here they actually set forth a process that included both system of mpas system of other perhaps sectoral measures taken to conserve marine biodiversity but also looking at your approach to managing biodiversity as a whole which includes managing biological resources within and without marine protected areas so that they're sustainable i mean outside the mpas promote protection of ecosystems habitats and species not just in mpas but also beyond and then promoting environmentally sound compatible development adjacent sort of like a buffer zone and then of course the overarching need which is to regulate and manage its processes and activities to avoid significant adverse impacts now so what are we talking about when we talk about types of marine protected areas well we have the classic marine protected areas with multiple categories iucn has six but here the one that many are talking about because it's the most sure of securing long-term protection and resilience in the time of client chain climate change is the marine reserve where areas are reserved for science for wilderness values and not for extractive there's also another category that talks about sustainable use inside of an mpa and if you look into the actual guidelines and standards they're talking about small scale use that is compatible with the primary objective of conservation and then of course there are recognized needs to have special measures for habitat and species protection but currently mpas are one type of area based management tool most of these are sectoral in nature and only cover one specific threat from one specific sector for example pssas deal with shipping apeis are still a provisional measure for areas of particular environmental interests that would be off limits to exploration of mineral resources in the area hoping that those become a more permanent fixture vulnerable ecosystems are off limits only to deep sea bottom fishing contact fishing and those are designated when there's a concern a likely potential for an impact that would be significantly adverse and hence the area is closed off in anticipation in order to avoid those significant adverse impacts moving on looking into the future what i'm hoping we'll start to talk about is the need for a flexible approach in the draft agreement to truly recognize that the need for globally recognized designated and potentially managed um area-based management tools that go beyond a marine protected area for example in the pacific region you already have this concept of an ocean scape can we start to really look at how you start to manage wider activities bring everybody on board you need your buffer zones around me protected areas uh dynamic migratory corridors yama will talk about that a little bit more but reporting is a fairly simple requirement to request states to actually inform you when they're coming near an area coming near a potential vulnerable area so that you can get them the latest information on environmental concerns and of course the need to be looking forward the relevance for the objective section of the treaty is again conservation is the dominant priority um and looking towards the whole focus of the treaty the added value of the treaty is to create that network of mpas create that global mandate to protect maintain and restore biological diversity and ecosystem integrity the difference um special component about mpa is that they are managed subject to a management plan so it's not just ad hoc one sector at a time but it's comprehensive and the primary role here would be at the global with support from the sectoral and regional when you get to the other area based management tools yes there is definitely a role for tools that can promote sustainable use but these can be both ad hoc like the volvo marine ecosystems are or systematic trying to look at where are your migratory corridors what are your hot spots in the marine environment that may just be subject to a single stressor that needs to be addressed and again this needs to carry forward that obligation to protect and specially manage ecosystems habitats and species outside of marine protected areas and here the roles are sectoral regional as well as global moving forward and how do you actually start to create platforms for cooperation to enhance um coordination and action looking more specifically at articles 15 19 and 20. that's moving forward the president's draft text envisages this bifurcated roles where your primary obligation is to promote coherence which is relatively vague and may be hard to measure actually how much progress you're making the aim is to promote coherence first through relevant bodies and then through this agreement and only when there are no other relevant bodies to adopt where there are relevant bodies to adopt complementary measures and only when there is no body to adopt marine protected areas and adopt measures some are even suggesting that there should be an obligation to establish a new body for management where there is not one but then it puts on to states parties the onus to make these arrangements for consultation to enhance cooperation and coordination suggestions stemming from the area based management tools workshop are really about the state's parties do have a direct obligation and should have a direct obligation to promote the adoption of marine protected areas and area other area-based management tools directly and through their membership in existing bodies based on this duty to protect and preserve the important thing to note is that many states who care about biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction are not parties to regional fisheries management organizations may not be able to send people to the international maritime organization in london or kingston jamaica for the isa so this is a chance for all states to have a say in the future of our ocean and in terms of platforms for cooperation to actually help to implement the obligations to cooperate looking forward to really building on that conference of parties role to make it a more active facilitator and then in terms of decision making which parallels 15 is the conference of parties shall or may still to be determined uh establishment of abm t's is only where their existing bodies again it bifurcates this role and the power of the conference of parties only comes to play where there is no other existing party um existing body an alternative approach is really to enable the conference of parties to take active decisions to establish mpas adopt management plans establish other abmts to have this consultation process first to bring all states and organizations on board but for the power the inherent power of the state to adopt conservation measures to state parties and then to recommend other area-based management tools and how um we're sort of envisaging this allocation of responsibility is really looking at what we already have is that fishing shipping states involved and organizations their obligation under the conventional biological diversity and under existing international law is truly to integrate biodiversity considerations into their management and to manage to avoid significant harm as sdg 14.2 but the components of biodiversity are something much different even the conventional biological diversity treats them differently we all have a collective responsibility to manage sustain and protect those components of biodiversity both through measures of institute conservation but also throughout their range and this can be done through processes and activities that are under national jurisdiction and control coordinated through this conference of parties that's this is the place where you can come together to actually say this is the will that we are directing to manage the components of biological diversity and leave the fishing and shipping organizations responsible for managing their specific activities but with the benefits of additional knowledge about biodiversity about ecosystems about threats and stressors to really help them do their job so this is i'm looking at potential institutional arrangements the global conference of parties everybody has agreed on and we're talking about making arrangements for cooperation coordination one of the things that we've learned about is sort of informal formal platforms for biodiversity collaboration could take many different roles they're not going to take away the role of the sectoral organization responsible for managing activities but they're going to try to bring together those who are concerned about the activities and those who are concerned about the biodiversity and for example the possible roles might be the dedicated implementation arm just as the conventional biological diversity look to regional seize organizations to implement the cbd at a regional level but the important part is it's devolved powers and authorities from the conference of parties to actually try to proceed and answerable of course to the conference of parties but to create a level playing field for both biodiversity interests and activity interests it could be ad hoc at first perhaps the simple edition of the conference of parties may make arrangements for collaboration consultation is sufficient but the point is it's open to all states organizations and other sectors with an interest in biodiversity collaboration and not just those who are parties to the sectoral organizations because biodiversity truly is a concern of all so moving towards the end really just to wrap up the ten enabling conditions that we're really looking at for a future-proofed new treaty is to recognize that the global ocean is a common it's a common concern common responsibility its biodiversity is a common interest of all that we can all benefit from better management from better science from better collaboration that's we can build capacity for all but to do this we need to enable nimble measures by not foreclosing opportunities for these uh future type of mpas we need to be ensuring access and improving access to data monitoring and information from all players who are out at sea as well as the future u.n decade of ocean science and to provide these robust institutional elements that can take us forward to the next 30 years and then finally just to focus on really defining the specific conservation obligations not just protect and preserve but this is an opportunity to actually say this means in situ conservation this means protection of habitat species to recognize the interconnectivities of both ecological uh oceanographic as well as cultural establish clear requirements for precaution david will get into that incorporating existing definitions standards what is an mpa what is not and fundamentally we need to strengthen the existing bodies we have but to recognize their limits and their mandate um as well as the limits in their sphere and the need to be able to pull all of us together in the same canoe as we are going forward so thank you very much i appreciate your attention i'm looking forward to questions and if there's further desire for information here are some sites to look forward to thank you very much thank you very much indeed christina i think that was very enlightening i i always learn a lot when i listen to christina and you know despite the fact that we've had dialogues about this now for many many years um this is an evolving field and i think all of us feel that we need to learn and understand it better so i would encourage you all to ask the questions you might have to christina put them in the question box and then when we continue with the dialogue of all of us we will have an opportunity to try to address as many of those as possible so thank you very much christina and i will ask uh dr david freestone who is a visiting scholar and adjunctor professor at george washington university law school to come on board and share your screen there we have david excellent so david um is um also running the sarah gasser c projects in 2010 and he's currently the executive secretary of the saragasso sea commission which was established pursuant to the 2014 hamilton declaration on collaboration for the conservation of the sargasso sea so the idea here is to really get a case study what would an area-based management tool look like in the high season and this is one of the first attempts that's getting to that and i think it's a very exciting example because for many of us the high seas is basically the place when we're flying across the atlantic that we look at two and a half movies on and we actually barely look out the window so very few of us have a real uh relationship to it whereas i think the sargasso sea is in fact a place which you know many of us have some notion of but we don't really understand it we didn't really have the the real sense of it and here we have an opportunity to i think learn from david how uh we have picked this area what are the types of uh conservation measures that can be put in place and how would we fit new treaty on area-based management tool to uh address the types of challenges we have in the serge soc so without further ado david the floor is yours thank you very much carl and uh a great pleasure to be here and uh welcome to again my welcome to all the participants i think we have a very healthy audience so absolutely delighted i've only got a few minutes so i've gotta always have too many slides so i'm gonna move through it fairly quickly a little word about where it is and why it's important initially it's the uh northern subtropical gyre which actually holds so that's the currents of north uh atlantic subtropical jar hold the sargassum into this fairly tight uh area here around bermuda and bermuda is the only land territory within it it's the only sea without a coast really except the islands of bermuda and this is the area which the um signatures to the uh convent to the uh declaration on collaboration for the conservation of the sargasso sea which i'll be talking a little bit about uh have designated as the area of collaboration there are 10 government signatures now to that declaration and i should say that i'm speaking on my own behalf and that's the commission not on behalf of them i don't represent their views they have very strong views themselves so the aim of the south side soc project which is now 10 years old is led by the government of bermuda and it was threefold to achieve international recognition of the importance of the sargasso sea and to work with existing international and sexual organizations to achieve better protection in accordance with the law of the sea convention so this is ten years ago we were still having an ad hoc group on bbnj to have a move to the state we have now with the negotiation of international text so this was just a it's like a testing ground and when we see how we could use those experiences uh as an indication of what's possible and what's not possible so why is it important it's been called the golden floating rainforest of the north atlantic it's important from a legal point of view because it's actually no organization that has and if i'm just using my pointer here this is natniak the northeast atlantic fisheries organization this is nafo northwest and then this is the sargasso sea here so there is no regional fisheries organization that governs this area icat has responsibility for tunas for the whole tuna like species for the whole of the atlantic uh and in the northeast atlantic we also have an environmental organization ospa which is virtually the same same area nothing here so this is an area which is a something of a legal vacuum uh it's also important because it's a unique system it's a sargassum base based on the floating seaweed which reproduce it's holoplagic it reproduces by without contact with with the earth for the ground and if you float anything in the ocean fish come and sit underneath it so it has actually a very important role in the life history of a lot of species turtles it's the areas where they spend their many famous lost years they just seem to disappear into the atlantic this is where they find this uh nurturing environment also tuna fish billfishes sharks and it's only the only place uh in the world where the european eels spawn but about that later these are some into the endemic so this is just to give you idea of this flavor of this very special ecosystem in the middle of the atlantic iconic species whales spillfishes turtles and even the famous uh blue fins moved through it although they didn't actually spawn in the sargasso sea we think um and as i said this nurturing environment tiny uh turtles are actually find their way in the kindest uh haven there but also fishes flying fish actually spawn and they attach their eggs to the sunglasses so it's a very special place this is uh just a quick picture of the anguilla deals the european and the north american eels actually spawn in this area just south we think of bermuda here and we only know this by having found their larva the leptocephali and these are the indications of how big they are when we find them so or where they have been found 10 cent 10 millimeters and 50 milliliters so very small guys they think maybe this the actual spawning takes place maybe even slightly more to the to the east so that eels live in fresh brackish water they splay maturity from 20 years on or so they swim three three four thousand miles to this area for reasons we have no idea and then they spawn in this and they the larvae hatch in these areas here and then they find their way back the european deals find their way back to europe and the american eels find their way back to canada to us and some of the islands of the caribbean the big ones with with rivers all ocean areas are subject to to to threats so i'll just point this out for you pollution garbage plastic perhaps overfishing harvesting sargassum exotics as well as ocean acidification climate change etc so in 2014 we were actually able to pull together a number of governments to sign the hamilton declaration so this is a non-binding political commitment to collaborate for the conservation of the sargasso sea we had originally five government signatures we now have 10 and we have a number of governments who have been very supportive over the years as well as those signatures so the azores bahamas bermuda the big british virgin islands canada the cayman islands dominican republic monaco uk and the united states and in addition netherlands sweden south africa and texas islands and portugal have also been very supportive as well as a number of organizations that have worked with us the the structure that's established is fairly loose are meeting with the signatures as required you should try this once a year and the sargasso sea commission is unusual and that it's uh independent volunteers who are appointed by the government of bermuda on the nomination of the signatory government who serve in their personal capacity so i say again i'm speaking on that behalf not on behalf of this interest we have financial mechanism both in the u.s and in bermuda and then a very uh small secretariat lean and mean has said it's two of us and that's the that's current commission we start off by by uh doing a baseline environmental science agreement so i'll give you some idea of the sort of impact of the importance of this a lot of collaboration 74 collaborative some 10 countries 11 science organizations many of which you'll recognize from these logos like woods hole and the southampton national oceanographic center and others so that's been that was approved actually through the bermuda cabinet and then to the uk government was proved before we move forward bermuda i should say is self-governing but it is a civil overseas territory of the uk and our first success was to actually have it described as a as an ebsa ecologically biologically significant area after a workshop in uh in brazil in 2012 and then it was was agreed by the conference of pastors in that same year and this is this is not a legal definition they're legal it has no legal connotations it's merely a description a science-based process which identifies this area as being of ecological or biological significance which should be quite an important part of the process for that eight years ago we've also were the only named ecosystem in the first ocean assessment uh in excuse me in 2015 and we've already got the second one going and we've already finished our our draft so i said it's the only named ecosystem the others coral reefs and sea grass beds etc sargasso sea is the only sort of geographically identified area in the assessment we've had been working with all those competent organizations which have impinged on this on this area nafo for example they can see the area of competence of the north west atlantic this is the bermuda e zed and this is our ebsa here and these the seaman's the corner sea mountain you see mounts around there and in 2015 napa as a result of a proposal put forward on our behalf by two of the signatory governments uh closed those seamounts they really were probably closed where they had a full investigation and closed them completely and they also banned the use of of gear middle water trolling gear which might touch the bottom so respecting the fact that these are vulnerable marine ecosystem the vmes that christina just thought of the other fissuring organization is a rather bigger and rather more difficult uh organization to work with icat we commissioned a study in 2011 which showed this is a fish but this is actually the fishing effort in these areas very low fishing blue is dark blue is no fishing effect at all like blue is some effort these the red lips of the fish are actually the the probably the u.s swordfish fleet and a little bit of possibly iu fishing going on over here but nothing within the bermuda ez no commercial fishing and this is all fairly low aspects so we've done a lot of work with the icap with icat through the ecosystem subcommittee we got a band-aid in 2012 to actually look into this it wasn't quite as strong as we'd hoped but to look at data information concerning the sargasso sea we've actually produced most of that and then in 2016 we actually uh got some agreement from the uh yes sorry 17 isn't it from the uh from the pool commission to actually look at uh the issues of weather of ecosystem-based fisheries management we'd actually propose sargasso sc be regarded as a pilot for an ecosystem-based fisheries approach that wasn't agreed by the parties but we've been looking into the information about it and we've actually just this year in a virtual meeting of the subcommittee that was it was agreed that we would be a pilot so that's we've been going there for now ten years and that's the result what we've managed to achieve uh it's not a lot it's something but it's not a lot remember there is an obligation on icat as well as the other bodies to to uh under the fish stocks agreements of 19 1995 that's a long time ago to implement ecosystem based approach on on a precautionary approach as well in the meantime the area of low fishing we can see this is from ocean mine the the area of fishing the amount of fishing has actually increased and so there's a summary of those three years up to 2018 shows at the 2017 shows actually the red is actually fairly heavy areas and last year we actually global fishing watch did this capture this uh snap present shows that we've actually there's now it's now an area of quite increasing fishing effort so we've kind of lost the opportunity we had an area which was would have been fairly easy to put conservation measures in which we have probably lost that opportunity because we're now talking about displacement so you know that's an indication imo has been more this is also fairly difficult remember imo has a lot of uh options available for uh abm t's smartphone special areas routine measures reporting dallas water controls etc uh all within the context of the pssa the particularly sensitive sierra christina again we've looked at possible measures in relation to imo in the meantime increased vessel traffic we may you may be aware that since 1990 vessel traffic has increased 300 percent globally and with the opening of the widened pan uh panama canal has happened with the sun sea and that's one month in 2000 that's december 2018 again global fishing watch the number of vessels over 100 meters long so these are big guys and that's an area of open ocean so one of the lessons that we've learned from this is a paper that christina and i did some 2016.

[00:36:30]um 10 years we've been doing this and it's not an easy task remember that the law of the sea convention and the 1995 fish stocks agreement provide a fairly strong mandate christina already talked about the obligations of after 197 900 sorry 194 paragraph 7 to talk about protection of fragile ecosystems and habitats we had the mandate for an ecosystem approach in the fish stocks agreement and for a precautionary approach which means that you don't have to prove damage you have to show the high likelihood of damage so the tools are available but they're not being used i think i mean napo is probably an exception in that it's closed off these areas that we were talking about the uh it's closed off its uh uh c-mount areas as vme but it's meeting the requirements of the vme requirements of the resolutions and it's also beginning to adapt to adopt an ecosystem based approach to its fisheries icat still a long way away from that so we're now into how many years are we after the 25 years since the since the the 1995 fish stock agreement mandated this imo there are no ics at pssas there are very few special areas as well in high seas southern ocean mediterranean which are unique systems most of the protection measures there is associated with this which are required for pss pssa are safety based they go through the marine safety committee rather than marine environmental protection committee so areas to be avoided routing measures etcetera those so the system isn't oriented towards uh the protection of the environment into biodiversity in the way that we're we're seeking to advocate so again commission's view on this is that we've got these legal obligations in place and it's not enough persuasion and peer pressure has not really been enough to persuade the parties to these sexual agreements to actually take measures we christina mentioned the provisions of decision making in article 9 and the cop really has part of decision but only where there is no existing organization so there is always a global organization in relation to seabed mining there's always an organization global the imo the organization and also all the fish all the tuna fishing is already covered by by this network of tuna fishing arrangements so we think that's not been enough so we think that it shouldn't just be a bottom line where there's when there's a vacuum but we think that the accomplish the parties should have that power if the sector organizations have not taken action to actually uh establish a protected error or impose an abmt initially do it by consultation and collaboration but if the if that doesn't happen there should be that bottom line we should be looking at 20 you know 30 by 2030 that's going to take a lot of decision the good news is we've just won a gf grant first it's a three million grant the first one for a multi-sectoral high seas project but we've been running for 10 years and we've had financial problems over the years so the other issue for us to look at maybe not today but in one of your future webinars is that we think that the the setting up of neurations of new arrangements or networks which are envisaged by the new agreement there should be some financial mechanism for this otherwise it's only going to be the developed countries and be able to do this so happy to take any questions thank you very much thank you very much david i i think that was very enlightening and i i certainly uh learned a little bit more about the sargasso sea also which is such a special place and you know that's one of the reasons when we were thinking of how would we pick a couple of cases we we went for the serge soc because it is easier to define as an area one of the problems we have in the high seas is you know why this area and what why not some other areas and i think you've been able to convincingly tell us why this is such a special area and why we need to do some very targeted efforts to to protect it and find mechanisms but as you're really rightfully pointing out you know the pressures are building and and even if it has been relatively uh okay so far you know there is a number of of things looming on the horizon and we still don't really have the entire arsenal of tools in place and we certainly don't have the financial or long-term mechanisms in place to make sure this is working so now let's move to the third presentation and before i do that also i should say anyone who has any questions for david please put them in the through the question box and we'll be very happy to try to address as many as possible our third and final speaker today is dr guillermo antonio crespo and he's a marine special ecologist and he just got his phd from duke university and he's been working a lot on temporal overlap of high seas fisheries uh in areas beyond national jurisdiction and that's really uh part of what he will be talking about today i mean the whole topic of uh how can we look at emporial uh protection measures so one one of the problems of course is in dynamic systems like the ocean you know resources move and and we need to find mechanisms of actually protecting the functionality of these and seeing that that will work so we're also happy to learn that guillermo has made it back to europe and he's now heading up to my home country of sweden and by the way the swedish government is the main sponsor of of these set of webinars and you will be at the stockholm resilience center which is an excellent institution and i'm very happy that you will be joining the team up there shortly so without further ado guillermo the floor is yours thank you very much carl i look forward to moving to to sweden soon and hello everyone um thank you very much for the previous presenters and for joining us in this very important presentation our presentation series on how we go about protecting what is essentially half of our planet um in today's presentation i'm going to be focusing a little bit more on some of the details of how we design and implement error-based management tools for the ics and the importance for the bbnj treaty to move beyond uh static spatial management and make use of the best available data and technologies to incorporate some of that dynamism that we know exists in the in the high seas much of the content in today's presentation is contained in uh uh on a scientific uh article which will soon be published in the journal marine policy you have the the title uh on the bottom of your screen so if you want to look for it in the in the upcoming weeks but essentially what i wanted to talk about today is that for many decades we the the remoteness and dynamism of the high seas have posed a very significant challenges for monitoring research management and enforcement efforts um and during this time period where the high seas felt so distant and so hard to study and protect human activities expanded and intensified significantly not only shipping and fishing as we've heard uh delaying of underwater cables uh as well as deep sea mining have uh grown quite significantly in 46 percent of our planet um we are now at a crossroads with this uh bnj treaty where um there seems to be political will and advancements in technologies under our understanding of the open ocean now allow us not only to implement and force and monitor error based management tools but have these reflect uh the tree dynamism of the open ocean and face future challenges such as climate change we have to monitor multiple activities in a constantly changing open ocean i would like to use an analogy that we're all experiencing right now to um to discern between mitigation efforts that are currently taking place in the shipping and fishing sectors versus avoidance um if we are going to be if we are exposed to covet in this situation that we're experiencing we can we can reduce the risks by washing our hands washing surfaces or wearing face masks that is assuming that you are going to be in close proximity to someone who potentially has the virus avoidance on the other hand is what we're doing right now we're not overlapping in space and time and that's why i don't have to talk to you with with a face mask because the risk has been um reduced to zero by not sharing the same location in space and time in the context in in this case of maritime fishing we have uh focused our efforts on mitigation changing how fishing practices take place modifying fishing gears for instance but the use of spatial management of abm fees essentially to avoid the risk has not really taken place or or kicked off in the high seas we have some examples but as i will go over there are very very few i think the focus of spatial management should not be to exclude all activities but to selectively allow for some depending on the interest of each sector in this case um in the context of phishing again we want to allow the overlap of the stress or fishing activities with target biodiversity we want these industries to catch um billfish within a quota system but we want to minimize their overlap with non-target biodiversity or your bycatch species this is not to say that um that phishing cannot coexist with error-based management tools but more that it has to happen in a smart way that understands the distribution of each of these three components and this is particularly hard in high seas where all these three move in what seem to be in predictable ways but thanks to technology and advancements in science we can now predict them um in the present and into the future so what i will be suggesting here today is that we have to use the appropriate tools at the appropriate scales in order to manage uh the high seas spatially and what up what i mean about appropriate scales are the three that you have on your screen there is a spatial scale to error-based management tools of course but there is a temporal scale that from my point of view has not been covered in sufficient detail in the bbnj negotiations and as well as a taxonomic scale where there seems to be some friction with existing instruments as to where the mandates lie and what um biodiversity can be protected through uh bbnj abmts versus let's say imo abnts so from my point of view this first one has been adequately addressed in the current uh process but the the latter two uh i think need a little bit more work to illustrate what i mean with the taxonomic footprint i will lean on some of the data that is made available through the ocean geographic information system or obis it is housed under the united nations and i believe currently represents the best source of information um on the distribution of biodiversity in the high seas they have recorded the open system has recorded up to 23 000 species in areas beyond national jurisdiction and the figure to your right that the map um it looks like a fairly comprehensive uh that we have a fairly comprehensive understanding of where bbnj occurs in the high seas but if you look more closely any pixel that is in light or dark blue represents a 100 by 100 kilometer cell where we have only one between one and ten records in what is supposed to be again the most comprehensive uh biodiversity database and any pixel and white is a again a 100 by 100 kilometer cell where we have no data so if we're trying to advance a conversation about air based management tools in the high seas and we were trying to protect in this case fish biodiversity that we know of 4 000 species or so in the high seas the best data that we have in hand right now is would not be sufficient to let's say establish an mpa or tamara closure in the indian ocean or the of the southeast pacific this is not to say that the data does not exist many countries have very valuable biodiversity information they just haven't shared it with obis quite yet unless we we make a conscious effort to widely share uh what each state knows about by diversity in the high seas we will have a very patchy uh understanding of bbnj that i don't think will truly let us protect um biodiversity uh through abm fees um my sort of colleagues in the terrestrial realm who have to think about the conservation of giraffes or lions and african savannah have a relatively easy job because they can afford to think in two spatial dimensions um you can identify a watering hole or an area of importance for these species draw a static uh rectangle on a map and and that should suffice given given the characteristics of the savannah um this sort of two-dimensional static closures could also work for some bentley uh benthic ecosystems and we've seen a growing number of um vulnerable marine ecosystems be identified um so to a certain extent traditional terrestrial management approaches could work in the deep ocean but what we're seeing because of climate change is that some of these closures um may become uh will lose effectiveness over time as changing climatic conditions lead to a redistribution of biodiversity when we think about biodiversity in the water column in the open ocean the story is much more complicated and this is a type of dynamism that i don't think uh the current text captures just as well uh we have to think not in two or three but four spatial and simple dimensions to truly understand how biodiversity changes distribution across um half of our planet the ships are horizontal and seasonal or they could also be vertical and diurnal so there's multiple spatial and temporal scales that come into play and um and now we have a much better understanding of what factors may be driving these changes and if we can predict those dynamic area based management tools become a reality and again this is something that perhaps 20 years ago not having access to information or the knowledge could be not an excuse but a legitimate reason but nowadays i think we we do have the technology and tools to move forward with more uh complex and smarter error based management tools um so the point i'm trying to get across um in this presentation is that there is more to abm ts and static mpas um and that abm these should truly reflect the spatial and temporal variability of the species habitats or ecosystems they're trying to protect and in this manuscript we identify four different temporal scales that we encourage negotiators and different parties to consider and i will go over them one by one very briefly but before that i want to give participants an understanding of the the current state of affairs of error based management tools in this case um in tuna rf modes there are very few examples of fisheries closures in the high seas right now they're all designed to reduce the catch of target species they're quite informal and some of them are voluntary they're poorly enforced and what worries me a lot is that they're static in space they don't they don't account for the for the changes in the oceanography of distribution species as they should over the last few years there's been a growing field known as dynamic ocean management which tries to reflect this variability that we observe in the oceanography or distribution of species they try to reflect that in the spatial management measures which are adopted so as the oceanography changes on the species engaged in the seasonal or annual migrations the spatial management measures move with with the areas that are most likely a suitable habitat for for targeting non-target species so um in order to make this type of spatial management viable we need a series of things including observations here to the left of your screen um which as you saw from obis um it is patchy from much of the non-targeted bladder versus in the high seas and once you if once you obtain those observations um you can process them using oceanographic information to try to establish a statistical relationship of where the animals are most likely to occur uh as oceanographic conditions change so once you have these predictive models you can uh use them to predict where let's say leatherback sea turtles will be next week based on the predictions of temperature next week but also under climate change and as climatological conditions change our area based management tools will also be able to to change with the ocean and i think that's the the approach to spatial management that we should um strive towards sectorally and cross-sectorally this is the kind of work that i do as part of my research i focus primarily on top predators and try to generate estimates of where they're most likely to occur but just as you can do this for vertebrates you can do it for for invertebrates pelagic and benthic to really capture changes in distribution within and between years so how do we monitor these dynamic abnts we can we are struggling in some instances to monitor static abm t's so how how do we go about monitoring closures that open and close throughout the year as you saw from david's presentation global fishing watch is one of the the many players in a growing field of monitoring human activities from space this animation shows uh fishing effort in the global ocean uh uh using um the trekking phishing effort using ais technology um it looks like we have a fairly good understanding at a global scale but what is what i'm showing you in the screen is only the vessels that are equipped with ais transponders and not all fishing nations uh require their their nationals to carry those transponders similarly we could generate these maps to monitor maritime shipping and fishing again but what we're seeing in the screen is not a true representation of of human activities in the high seas on the global ocean it is again just those vessels that are equipped with this type of transponder and this is something that i think the dbmj process should consider if we really want to understand where humans are with respect to biodiversity in the high seas global fishing watch for instance is trying to circumvent this this gap in knowledge by using different technologies um uh to map that what they call or what is generally known as a dark fleet which does not transport via ais so we have a series of tools um at hand to try to get a good understanding of where the global fishing fleet is but unless we have an understanding as i showed in that previous venn diagram of where the stressor is with respect to biodiversity we won't have the best information at hand to establish area based management for the temporal scales that i mentioned earlier these are the four now i'll explain them in a little bit more detail the contemporary scale is primarily based on ephemeral features such as ocean eddies to the left of the screen and thermal fronts to the right of the screen the squiggly lines you see on the figure to the left are different ocean eddies that we were able to track from space using sea surface temperature and sea surface height information and what's special about some of these eddies is that they aggregate biodiversity and are constantly redistributing bpmj across ocean basins so if we know where the eddies are and we can track them from space we could potentially use admts to prevent a phishing effort for instance or or maritime shipping to overlap with with eddies that that we believe are hosting vulnerable bbmj intra intra-annual temporal scales are your monthly or seasonal processes these are perhaps our best friends or the best friends of managers since they're very reliable and predictable across years a good example of this is a costa rica thermal dome where we can pretty much predict how the dome will behave between months of july or december and and uh this is the main temporal um sort of frame or scale that it could be used for for seasonal closures of shipping or fishing this conversation gets a little bit more complicated when we uh look at inter annual temporal scales which are semi-predictable and i would like for the audience to think about these as shocks to the system the figure to the right shows the el nino southern oscillation and changes in sea surface temperature depending on the phase of of this climatic cycle since these are not periodic uh they're hard to predict but if you establish an abmt during one of the el nino phases that could last as long as seven years and you use the best available signs the best available information and then the cycle switches to la nina you could see a massive redistribution of biodiversity that essentially deems your abm t uh ineffective if if the features that you were trying to protect suddenly move outside of of the square that you drew on the map and finally uh the last temporal scale that we encourage um delegates to consider is multi-decadal and this is referring to specifically to to climate change as we expected changes in climatological conditions will affect the abundance the vertical and horizontal distribution phenology size behavior extension risk and predator-prey relationships of bbmj so unless abmts have the capacity to account for some of these changes and move as biodiversity is being redistributed as we saw in the previous paper that i showed in the northeast atlantic these closures that have been have taken a lot of time and effort to establish will not be effective i would like to wrap up by just reminding participants that uh the open ocean and open ocean species and ecosystems does not do not stop at the eez boundaries and that there is a lot of trans-boundary connectivity linking the high seas to national waters coastal ecosystems and coastal communities and unless we are able to monitor uh biodiversity across these jurisdictional boundaries if the right abmts are not placed in international waters it is coastal communities and coastal ecosystems that may experience um the worst effects especially under climate change so um i know it's a it's a complicated matter and the bb engineer process but a transparent connectivity and perhaps trans boundary area based management tools are something that sooner or later i think we will have to address so with that i thank you for your attention and i will leave these final thoughts on the screen and i'm looking forward to the discussion with the panel thank you very much indeed guillermo um i think you covered a number of different challenges there i think we all know that the ocean is vast and there's many different things that need to be considered and i think you pointed out really many of the ones that are are perhaps most difficult to address at this point um but the good news is the tools are developing every year and we are getting better and better at doing these things so i think it's going to be down to a will to deal with it and dealing with a dark fleet dealing with various of the illegal activities that are gone in the high seas and finding mechanisms for for addressing them so i would now invite all of the um speakers and are two panelists to put on your videos and unmute yourself and i wanted to take this opportunity to introduce uh our two panelists so we have um professor jorge jimenez and he's director general for marvel and he's been doing that for the last 13 years marvel is a regional non-profit organization that promotes conservation and sustainable use of coastal marine ecosystem in the eastern tropical pacific um has specialized in marine ecology and he's developed a lot of different things related to marine spatial planning wetland conservation biodiversity in inventories and he's written over 100 peer-reviewed papers in all kinds of journals around the world he's also acted as visiting professor at institutions in the u.s latin america and the caribbean and our second panelist is stefan danielson who is the head of section at the natural environment division of the ministry of uh environment land and natural resources of the government of sweden and for those of you who are here last week for our eia he was also speaking in that one so the good news is we have a lot of uh excellent questions that have already come in so you've all been quite busy and and several of them of course are addressing the three presentations we just had but i would also invite for those of you who have not written any questions right now feel free to do so and we have a crack team um that are helping us simi payment and release pado are reviewing them and helping me to moderate also in terms of finding the the appropriate ones so i wanted to start with another case study uh that i think is really interesting and that's looking at um the eastern tropical pacific and addressing this one to jorge uh there is the uh costa rica dome can you tell us you i know you worked a lot on that one can you give us a little bit of a sense of you know what's actually um the challenges there and and you know where you think uh addressing conservation in this area is going right now and how would that fit within the tree team those are several questions and i i also would ask all of our our panelists and speakers to be relatively short yeah thank you carl uh yes the costa rica dome is an upwelling area that is located in front of the central american pacific coast it's mostly uh located in the high seas but because of the dynamic nature that it has it moves from easy to to to the high seas and expands into the easies of different countries in central america so in this case uh there is a significant fishery in this case tuna fisheries associated with the with the costa rica dome and there is interest by the central american countries to start managing this important area even though is beyond the national jurisdictions of the central american countries uh so so i think that uh that we faced as the same issues that that uh david and guillermo were mentioning we are dealing with the aftermath of uh an arbitrary boundary that divided an interconnected world which is the ocean into easy and high seas these arbitrary boundaries uh have separated the iron subwelling systems from from the riverine states in in in terms of jurisdictional and managerial issues and uh and it has the tremendous impact on on how the countries benefit from from those important systems uh which demand a lot of information on what are the linkages between these high systems and the coastal economies of the riverine countries so this is something that that i think that we will have to address very specifically in the upcoming years [Music] and highlighting the the the relevance that the high sea system has in the coastal economies and the other important issue that i want to address in the context of the of the costa rican dom is do not underestimate the investment necessary on on awareness we are talking about something that a lot of the population do not understand and and for them oceans is a it's a holiday issue it's something that is important only the holidays and and talking about something that is happening 300 miles off george is even more irrelevant for them so we need we're we are developing a new conception of the world so awareness information has to be very important category in the activities that we'll we'll have to develop in the upcoming years right thank you very much uh that was very enlightening and and i think it's another good example beyond the sargasso sea i wanted to look at the third place and and maybe i'll direct this to you staphon um looking at the the world's largest mpa in the ross sea in the southern ocean adjacent to antarctica what are the lessons learned we have there for uh you know creating this mpa and is there something that we can bring with us to the treaty from from the experiences in the ross sea oh yeah yeah i think thank you for the question um the the i mean we have to realize how what what a long and concerted effort it was this is established the rossi mpa in in the camelot our context and um i i think we we still have lots of work to do in in camel art to ensure that we have the the the proper management plan and we have a proper research and monitoring plan there and and and several other things but it i think one thing we learned was probably that um we shouldn't really rest and or rest but but it it's a long process and that we need to plan for all these phases that christina so eloquently shown in the beginning i think um perhaps we we um when developing the plans which uh are also set out in in in the president's draft when we're developing the these plans we need to have a plan for all the way to to to really finishing uh passing the the finishing line a long head not not just stopping by the decision of establishment but but really putting effort into making to producing real-time efficient management and review and review plans thank you very much there are probably many more lessons learned to to be learned from that process um including that it took some significant political interest to establish it but yeah we were both down there when it was actually finally decided and and you know we'd been there a few years and it was certainly not an easy process and i think it's fair to say that now if uh john gary hadn't uh called up uh the the russian leadership and pushed for this it would not have happened and i think we'll see this across the globe also that we need uh people to show political leadership to really move the needle in the right direction and we're still a long ways away and you know this is not how people consider winning votes so i i it'll be a struggle but the good news is i think a lot of people are increasingly waking up to the fact that uh this planet is in trouble and we need to address a number of the big challenges that we see ahead of us so guillermo i i have gotten another question here which i thought was perhaps interesting for you um so one idea that you know we you were mentioning is the four dimensional abm t's and marine protected areas um and how you would go about creating them uh using the different types of data that you have available could you give us if there are any examples of where we established such areas successfully um either is as outside of in the high seas or or potentially perhaps more within e zed's so we'll see an example of where it's actually working well and that you think would be a model that one could look at uh yes of course uh thanks for the question um i think there's a few examples of um of implemented tools that are able to account for uh all four spatial temporal dimensions um the examples that have been published on dynamic ocean management which were i showed one of my slides are proved that we can track the distribution of non-target species such as loggerhead sea turtles in the north pacific or southern bluefin tuna off the east coast of australia in ways that are communicated in near real time to the fishing community to avoid um to avoid bycatch events what initially seems like a like a purely uh conservation focused effort is also very beneficial to the to the sector in the case of the north pacific turtle example it's a tool called turtle watch and it helps the hawaii longline fleet uh avoid bycatch events of two speeds of sea turtle that took place beyond a certain number would lead to the immediate closure of the feet so these are not only tools to ensure conservation but also to help industry avoid negative impacts that could affect their interests in the in the near future so there's only a handful of examples i don't know if any that are established and implemented and enforced in the high seas um but i know that one of the tuna are most is taking decisive steps towards uh including this type of dynamism um in the pacific ocean actually so hopefully we'll see some of these sectoral bodies and perhaps the imo would also make sense assimilate a lot of information that is necessary for this type of management develop the tools bring the stakeholders to the table and show why this is a win-win type of tool that could help industry burn less fuel reduce bycatch and return back home to their families sooner thank you thank you so much yes i just would like to add that during the last years different organizations have been concentrated efforts in two cases studies the sargasso sea and the costa rica dome precisely in recognition of the need to develop a specific examples of how to handle these variables this studies these different methodologies not not not even mentioned yet governance issues to a specific seas areas and i think that that this is very important to highlight because we really need examples specific examples of uh things that can be done and show that they can be done and i hope that in the upcoming years these two sides will be good examples of that possibility thank you very much uh so i now have a question for maybe for david or christina um there is the um naru type agreement that was established um and it's sort of trying to address things like um these areas that that are within different within a pocket of exclusive economic zones um are there any uh possibilities of using that more broadly in other places like the arctic donut hole or or other areas any thoughts about that david and i'll start if i may um and i'm sorry i got bumped off twice so i hadn't come back in so i missed uh uh not long my line got broken off so if that happens that's me not taking my back home it's uh i i i can i just add some little comment about dynamism in relation to sargasso sea just to fill up follow up what jorge said and that is you know it is by nature a dynamic system it's two the area that we designated as our collaboration is two million square miles so we're not necessarily saying that that should be closed but there are various times of the year when particularly the convergence zone which is a lot of spawning takes place in activity those areas change and those change year by year as well as during the time so you know that that's another example that i can actually does have a a seasonal closure in the gulf of guinea which is a quite important uh uh dynamic system as well right so narrow so the idea of the the narrow agreement which was really a subset of those uh south pacific countries which are parties to the western central pacific fisheries agreement is really to control uh fishing within their ez's and those countries five of them on there have actually uh strongly controlled the fishing within their zed but if in order to take advantage of their act of accessing their waters they must the vessels that want to take advantage of that and have licenses mustn't fish in the high seas areas pockets between them so that's a quite a an interesting innovative approach to to a high seas governance if you like uh by using negative space so i think that's a that's possible uh a possible approach where a small group of countries that might work in the arctic um have actually taken a view in relation to uh to a particular stocks but the arctic also already is a small group and they've also have a concluded this important agreement on the uh uh on suspending it's not a total ban but it's a you know suspension of all fishing in that area for some time so they've already made some progress on that front i think perfect christina hi um just to point out that the narrow agreement is a really important achievement in the pacific but it's for a discrete enclosed area of the high seas where vessels have to pass through the exclusive economic zones to get there the situation in the arctic is quite different that there is no closed off um straits it is my understanding and it's much more of a high seas commons and so there's just an interesting article by vishwanan berkman and oren young talking about sort of what can we learn from the arctic for the bbnj agreement is yes the adjacent states you can use that term or the proximate states do have a distinct responsibility but it's not solely their responsibility for the high c segment and this becomes the responsibility of all and why the arctic five included other states in this um closing the high seas the pisces fishing freeze let's call it um because it can't just be a few states if you want it to be applicable to all states as a whole so you need that leadership you need that initiative to say we're going to do this and we encourage and create incentives and the other thing we can learn from the narrow agreement is that market states ports do matter you can enforce this agreement through erecting port state restrictions market state restrictions it's not just what happens on the high seas thanks thank you and and while i have you there um we were also asking a little bit of you could you expand how countries who are currently engaged in rfmos can be involved in in this process so you know the rfmo states they're active can they also take on responsibility when it comes to marine conservation well we certainly hope so and uh one of the ideas that some of us have been considering is could the rfmos be charged with creating a biodiversity action plan and strategy actually doing an assessment of where they're having an impact on biodiversity similarly for the international maritime organization the imo was charged with actually identifying sensitive areas back in 1978 and instead they sort of opted for this more case-by-case approach of particularly sensitive sea areas so states who are rfmos need to start at the national level coordinating their policies and making sure that their members who go to the fisheries organizations have a conservation mandate have an ecosystem based mandate but likewise states who are not going to the rfmos um can work through the the global conference of parties to both invite and request these regional rfmos members to tell them what's going on at the rfmo what are you doing in order to help protect biodiversity what measures have you adopted that's it needs to be a two-way street and the problem is the rfmos are composed of states with an economic interest in the fisheries only kamlar actually allows states who have even a scientific interest that's still a significant economic requirement the high seas belongs to us all and needs to be managed for the benefit of all thanks thank you very much and stefan you're the only representative of a government here do you do the swedish government or eu for example have views on this views on on rfmo and maybe i widen the question a little bit how do you get a broader engagement on this treaty and you know how do you make sure that uh all parties and all people have have a say in how this is constructed and that it actually represents their interests in a way well as as as you have as we have seen today i mean it it's not it's not a void out there it's uh there are many organizations environmentally tasked or fisheries tasks or or shipping tasks and and obviously they will will they they will need to be on board and they will need to have a role in within this agreement um i think that the interesting thing thing i think is to reflect on is in in areas where there is no um suitable mandate for meshes how do we do it there i think that that's uh that discussion is is is equally interesting as as um who who can be part in where there is a mandate okay and guillermo you have some thoughts about this also uh yeah certainly um just following up on on these two uh points uh i think it's important to remind coastal and island nations who perhaps have been a little bit less engaged or interested in in what happens beyond 200 nautical miles um to remember that um we i think it's annex one of the lovely that lists migratory species and there's about a hundred of them that were identified back in the 80s and 90s and now i think we're up to 850 or so migratory australian species across taxonomic groups many of those species migrate to each and every coastal and island nation in the world and whatever happens to those migratory starling species in the high seas will affect the ecosystems domestically and as it stands not to pick on anyone per se but i don't think any of the tuna rfmos have abmt's designed to reduce bycatch not a single one after many decades of rfmos um that is not to say they couldn't start implementing them but right now any impact on any of these 850 straddling species in the high seas are not accounted for and i mean the you know the the people who are going to end up paying the price or coastal and island states and perhaps some of those that are right now not as engaged as it should be so i would encourage coastal communities and states and indigenous peoples to have a lot of stake at the table to to realize this but at the same time we depend on data that is not being shared that knowledge is not always accessible so it's a chicken and an egg sort of argument but i can promise you that we could be doing a lot more to also protect our coastal communities thank you so we've also gotten questions in about financing how do we actually create a system which uh permits us to generate uh some revenue from somewhere so that we're not sort of looking at subsidies or you know grants to maintain things like the sargasso commission or whatever else management bodies we might have for area-based management tools of the time and one idea that was floated here is to see is there a possibility of getting rent from some of these activities either be it from the fishing industry or from other users of the high seas like the shipping industry or you know seabed miners or something like this so do you have any views on how would one go about that anyone who want to volunteer a little bit of how do we finance this i mean we might have a dedicated uh another session where we look at this but for this point more specifically on abm teas it might be interesting to hear your uh suggestions on that david yeah i'll have a just it's difficult one right um i mean i made this point about financing you know we've been the the beneficiaries of a number of philanthropists who particularly uh richard the laker rich rockefeller who actually was very committed to this and and put a lot of his own money and that of many of his colleagues as well so we've had a number of supporters important supporters um uh we've now got a gf grant but it's taken us and this is the first ever grant we've got so it's taken us a long time to get support for this um economists have been talking about user fees for a very long time right the even though even the tuna rf perennially short of money despite the huge amounts of money that are made by the operators who are actually taking the resource out so i think if the rfmos need to start looking at properly funding their activities as well right in terms of the profits that are made by from these activities so starting to do this from scratch in relation to new organizations will be very difficult but we do have financial mechanisms for the other big it could be other big environmental agreements like biodiversity convention and and the uh and the climate convention and mechanism use utilizing perhaps a gf at least or i don't have a great even the green climate fund might be a possibility but there are other other sort of funding mechanisms what what i'm getting at is that it's very difficult to start this operation from scratch so are we going to be dependent on the benevolence of a number of countries or who are interested in supporting this or or independent uh philanthropists we we should have there should be some form of funding mechanism which should be organized which would be sensible to organize at a global level and answer the question but addresses some of the problems thank you that's very helpful uh christina i think the the resource rent question is something that we will need to discuss into the future that's i know that in the seabed mining world the contractors are expected to share the benefits the revenue stream marine genetic resources we're talking about sharing the revenue stream part of it and the question is uh pisces freedoms has traditionally not included actually paying for access to these services but as there are more and more users in greater demand is it something that it's timely to consider thanks thank you very much anyone else okay nope nope okay uh guillermo thank you carl um the only thing i would uh i would um the way i would approach this is not how much money could be made necessarily but how much money is being lost annually by let's say ecotourism operators uh with you know estimated 300 000 marine mammals dying every year because of negative interactions in the high seas or in the global ocean actually or sea turtles or sea birds and we could go on so what what is the cost of some of these ecosystem services in the coastal ocean being eroded because of what happens in the high seas and i don't think there's many studies out there that have provided a satisfactory answer to this question but it is certainly happening the degree to which i don't know but um but we're currently losing ecosystem services because of our lack of action beyond the 200 nautical mile boundary thank you and stefan finally yes i was just wanting to make the the connection to capacity building here as well because it's not just good data and good science we this body or this instrument will have access to it's it's also important for wide participation and ensure that benefits could and should be spread um so so capacity building is central to this part of the agreement as it is to to the other parts can i just quickly come back um and just say that the financial question is significant and um long-term needs contributions great thought from everybody voluntary industry science we're getting a lot of in-kind contributions already but we could certainly um step up we need some long-term initiatives thanks yeah and i mean i i think in in lots of it will follow you know what form we put also if we're going to have new institutions then there needs to be a dedicated mechanism for them if it's existing ones you know it might be that one could uh lean on the existing funders of them and find some mechanism or sharing the costs of it and then of course you know in as much as there is a benefit and we actually are increasing and improving management there might be some potential small rent there but i don't think we should be over excited about that possibility presumably it's not going to be that great i think addressing things like freedom of of um shipping and things like this you know it's not like we're going to take tolls of people spending x amount of time i mean we're not on a toll road here so i i think one needs to be quite modest in terms of how we think about that also now another possibility is actually to go after the legal parties and make sure that you get them to pay but you know that is a somewhat more negative thing but in as much as you impounded vessels and things like that you could possibly generate a certain amount of revenue from those type of activities that might considerably be another angle to look at but as i mentioned i think we're interested in having another more dedicated session on more broadly how do we fund this treaty and what's the institutional arrangements and perhaps also looking at the broader capacity building and how do we share benefits between developed and developing countries in this context and all of those i think are going to be central to getting a treaty that everyone can be happy with and at least accept at some levels and that will be a challenge and that's obviously what many of us are working on to try to accomplish now i see that we've run over time already so rather than address any further questions i just wanted to give a chance to our speakers and panelists to perhaps say any parting words relatively briefly within a minute or so and before we close this session so should we start with you um guillermo do you have a couple of points um sure um i mean i think everyone understands the significance of these negotiations and it's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to to do things right um and in the context of area-based management tools uh the open ocean is very dynamic it's very complex but thankfully we now have the science to do a better job of managing the open ocean than tools that could be applied to the coastal ocean so i would encourage ambition i would encourage engagement with the scientific community science doesn't have all the answers but it can provide tools and means and uh and if anyone has any questions i would be more than happy to answer or point in the right direction to those who have the answers thank you thank you you're still muted i'm afraid i just probably will will mention three points i think it's very important to move away from the 19th century cartography and and and try to to take the opportunity to do this thing right because it's on is an important decision that is going to last for for centuries to come and and i think we already have the understanding and the capacity to actually do this right and and have dynamic nature incorporated within the upcoming activities in the high seas i think that also is very important to analyze the cost of not doing anything i think it's much higher than the cost of maintaining a system in the high seas and we need that information forward we need we need to to expose those numbers and and and see what is the cost of not doing any anything in the highest at this moment how much is costing the the countries and not only not only the adjacent countries but but countries even far away from from from the highest spots that we're looking at and and again i think it's very important to show the economical linkage between the isis and the local economies many of the ministers that i talked with this is the first question that they asked me why is this important for me and for our economy and and i think that we need those answers uh to be there with with robust information back in the map thank you so much christina hi thank you uh just to echo what my colleagues have already said but then to say that this is an opportunity to try to be creative flexible and nimble to evolve our international legal mechanisms for cooperation to confront current and future challenges what we need are really those ways to bring people together to bring the best available science but most importantly to take action now on what we know are the priorities for conservation we've been working on the cbd ecologically or biologically significant areas those could be a first look at where you want to go with ics marine protected areas while we build out these platforms for multi-stakeholder cooperation it's really essential that the ocean is changing we have an opportunity to build resilience and to promote productivity that all will benefit from into the future thanks thank you and then maybe stefan yeah thank you um well basically um i think that that that you have very well demonstrated the need for such an instrument and that that we need such an instrument to establish measures to protect biodiversity in in in this area beyond national jurisdiction so there's short period of time we cannot drag it out too long um so even though it might be a little bit imperfect i'm in in for instance such as guillermo um shown and certainly done in in terms of dynamic features i think it will be um things to add on and things to to complement over time but it's a it was very useful suggestion of course but i think it's um the need to to to do them to walk the walk is not thank you very much and then the the final comment from david right well what a lot of burden to put on my shoulders i'm very flattered thank you and of course i was going to say exactly what guillermo uses but it's the chance of a generation uh and it is uh you know we we we rightly regard the law of the sea convention which took nine years remember to negotiate once they even established the process as being pretty well the ground rules but there are a lot of gaps in it still and this is what we're we're talking about i think we've we've got a lot of uh 30 years of experience of this and we've supplemented it already by in a couple of ways by implementing agreements so there are some you know some obvious lacuna gaps in the system that we need to address and i think we've identified a lot of them today so that's been i think that's been tremendous um i agree with stefan to a point that we shouldn't we need to get it done but i think we've got the opportunity because of you know the fact that we're all talking virtually we're an opportunity to sit back a little bit and think about where we got with this negotiation and let's not run into an agreement which doesn't address all these things let's make sure that we use this time to actually come up with a with a slightly more flexible agreement that will actually address the the issues that we're talking about today so thank you very much for giving that opportunity thank you very much david and and thank you to all of the speakers and panelists for for excellent and and thank you to all those attending who who also helped us with with a number of very interesting and motivating questions and so i started out saying we'd be very happy to hear if you would like us to do other webinars like this what kind of topics what kind of questions would you like to have addressed so that we can help the people in the past with a tough assignment of developing a a wonderful treaty that will benefit uh future generations so from my perspective this has been a really a good and enlightening opportunity to address this um i've been keenly following this for a number of years and and i think we are getting to a point here where we can really make a huge difference in the world i mean we really have the opportunity it's within our grasps to address this issue and we know there will be stumbling blocks we know there's a number of sticky issues that need to be agreed but the good news is you know if there's a will to address this this is actually quite doable and i'm optimistic that we will be able to do so i would encourage all of you who are attending to talk to your governments if you're not from the government yourself and encourage them to really focus on this issue because we need their participation we need their activities right now if they're not engaging we will not get there and as we saw with the rossi political leadership is going to be key right now that might not seem like what we have in most supply around the world but i'm sure we can find opportunities to work with many like-minded governments who really want to make this happen so i would encourage you all to out and and speak to the people that you think are in the negotiations who are interested in these type of topics and if there are technical issues or if there are other challenges you would like to have addressed let us know and as i see and we're committed to working on this topic and i just highlight for those of you who might want to know a little bit more about this topic this is a publication we recently cut out on you can get it on the icn website and you're more than welcome to to download it there's a short four page here and there's a little bit longer report also which stress tests the idea of having these area based management tools in the high season you know how would you go about it and i think we have a lot of our best experts in the world uh addressing this issue and and so we are making some progress on that so with that i would like to thank all of you and uh we're looking forward to seeing you on the next one goodbye