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Flags hung at the reconvening of the COP16 conference in Rome last month, with an inset image of Adrian Gahan, the ocean lead for Campaign for Nature.
What happened at the UN Biodiversity Summit in Rome, and what comes next?
Countries gathered in Rome in late February to finalize key decisions left unresolved after last year’s COP16 summit in Colombia. In Italy, negotiators agreed to the first global deal for finance conservation, which aims to achieve the landmark goal of protecting and restoring 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030. Eurasia Group’s María José Valverde interviewed Adrian Gahan, the ocean lead for Campaign for Nature, a global campaign founded in 2018 to secure the 30x30 target, as we look ahead to the UN ocean conference and continue building on the nature agenda for 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
María José Valverde: What are your expectations for the achievement of the 30x30 goal in the marine space, keeping all upcoming UN environmental processes (biodiversity, plastics, ocean, climate) in mind?
Adrian Gahan: This is an important year because we’re only five years away from the 2030 target. And the reality is that we're not making progress at the pace that we should. Something really important that can happen this year is the ratification of the High Seas Treaty. Whilst it’s been agreed, it needs to be ratified by at least 60 countries before it comes into legal effect, and at the moment, we’re at 17 countries. We should aim to get those remaining 43 countries in 2025, and we need to do it before Q4 for the treaty to come into legal effect this year. This would represent a significant step forward, and it'd be great if going into COP30 in Brazil we’re already counting down the ticker on the treaty taking legal effect.
Could you explain why this High Seas Treaty is so important?
Before this treaty was agreed in 2022, there was no legal instrument to manage biodiversity on the high seas, areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) 200 nautical miles off of a country’s coast. Instead, you had a patchwork of preexisting organizations — the International Whaling Commission, which is species-specific, and the International Seabed Authority, which covers the seabed but doesn't regulate the water column above the seabed. But they couldn’t establish marine protected areas covering the whole water column or all flora and fauna within it because they didn't have the legal capacity to do that. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty, or BBNJ, will allow countries to agree on setting parts of the international waters aside for nature in the context of all of these pre-existing organizations. And that is an innovation.
The high seas treaty could impact interests in critical minerals, deep sea mining, and those benefitting from marine genetic materials. The recently launched Cali Fund could also be a financial instrument for BBNJ areas. What are your thoughts on its potential implications?
This is one of the reasons why it’s taking countries a long time to ratify this treaty. They need to figure out what are the benefit-sharing mechanisms, what are the legal and financial instruments involved, etc. A lot of it has to be discovered as we go along. My headline observation around digital sequence information and the Cali Fund is that if it’s going to be meaningful, it has to be a regulatory requirement. That also needs to apply to BBNJ areas, which obviously have more complexity to it by definition because it’s beyond the territorial boundaries of any of these countries. But to be effective, it needs to be legally binding.
What’s at stake if we don't reach an agreement on finance at COP16.2, and what are the best- and worst-case scenarios for the marine sector?
The money is very important as part of the biodiversity COP process, not just because of the funding, but also because it’s a currency of seriousness. If we are asking the Global South to protect some of the last great wild places in the world that are providing vital infrastructure to the whole planet, then we need to be prepared to pay for it. This is not about charity – nor should it be considered aid. Donor countries need to show seriousness on this, and finance is one of the ways to do that.
It’s also important to consider our political context. Given budget and geopolitical constraints in the Global North, we need to continuously make the case as to why this is important. It is not just because nature is beautiful and special. We’re protecting it because it provides us all with an essential service, and this is an extension of our national security budget. We need to keep making that case. We also need to keep making the case that the private sector, which is making a lot of money and continuing to drop significant externalities onto this infrastructure, needs to pay its way. That’s an example of where governments need to intervene more in the market: tax and regulate.
The plastics negotiations have a lot of interlinkages with the biodiversity talks because of the Global Biodiversity Framework’s (GBF) Target 7 on pollution. Do you see any implications from the UN plastics treaty negotiations on your work?
We focus more on spatial targets and protection because the biggest threat to the global ocean, other than climate change, is not plastics, it’s overfishing. This is really worth reminding people. Plastics and pollution are very serious, but overfishing is a bigger threat. The crisis of overfishing is an absence of something, which is a harder narrative to sell than showing people an ocean full of plastic. The risk of the plastics narrative is that people think using paper straws means the crisis is solved. But, the ocean is facing so many more threats than plastic straws. However, the issue can be an important way to introduce people to the crises of climate change, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and invasive species.
My final point on that is that the single biggest polluter of plastic in the ocean is not PepsiCo or Coca-Cola — it’s the global fishing industry. The single biggest source of plastic in the ocean is discarded fishing nets known as ghost gear. It doesn’t biodegrade, it’s hugely destructive, and it’s very helpful to the global fishing industry if everyone obsesses about plastic straws and bottles instead.
Conversations around fishing are tricky because they become a discussion about livelihoods and food security. How do you navigate these difficult issues?
It’s much easier to campaign against Coca-Cola than it is to campaign against local fishermen dropping their nets in the ocean. However, the most destructive fishing is conducted by very large and wealthy industrial fishing vessels, almost all owned by rich countries from Europe and Asia, not by local small-scale fishers. That said, there also needs to be training and engagement at the local level, which is difficult and time-consuming. One answer is to set parts of the ocean aside where you state there’s no fishing, and that makes it a lot easier to regulate. This requires government intervention and financial support for fishers who need to, for example, change their gear types or face a reduced catch for a short period while the spillover effect takes place. It becomes very complicated, and that’s why we’re making very slow progress toward the 30x30 goal.
One of the things we’ve been paying attention to is the nature tech market. What are some concrete examples of nature tech in the marine sector, and what role is the private sector playing?
I think it’s a really positive story. One of the most important, disruptive technologies that has helped in establishing and enforcing marine protected areas is satellite technology. I've been working for years on a UK program called Blue Belt. We work with local communities that are concerned about illegal fishing coming into their waters and far too remote to have their own enforcement capacity. The UK Government runs the satellite monitoring programs and then provides them with the intel. They can tag any suspicious activity and pursue the vessel legally through the Port State Measures Agreement. It’s a legal process where, if one of these vessels fishes illegally in these protected areas and then pulls into a port to offload the fish, the port state can take legal measures against the vessel, even though the vessel didn’t break any laws in that port state. This has been a very effective tool for protecting these areas.
This would not have been possible probably 15 years ago. That’s a really positive tech story to tell and something people should take some hope from because presumably this technology will only continue to improve and get more affordable. Bad news can be very overwhelming for people. So I think it’s good to remind people that good people are doing good things in the world.
María José (Majo) Valverde is a global sustainability analyst at Eurasia Group.