What is the ‘BBNJ Agreement’ on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity?

What was the need for the BBNJ Agreement and when did it come into force?

The Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, commonly known as the BBNJ Agreement, is the first comprehensive, legally binding treaty designed to fill the regulatory gaps in governing the ‘high seas’.

The high seas are the areas of the ocean that lie beyond any country’s national jurisdiction, covering nearly two-thirds of the global ocean and roughly half of the Earth’s surface. As a shared ‘global commons’, the high seas have long been governed by a patchwork of bodies with overlapping mandates and significant regulatory gaps. The result has been poor protection and continued exposure to overfishing, pollution and unsustainable resource use. The triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution have multiplied these challenges, necessitating urgent action.

The BBNJ Agreement is the third implementing agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Adopted on 19 June 2023 after nearly two decades of negotiations, the Agreement entered into force on 17 January 2026. Its ratification offers a critical opportunity for unified action to protect what has been called the planet’s ‘last great wilderness’. As of May 2026, it had 145 signatories and 89 parties. The first meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Agreement is scheduled to take place around January 2027, when countries will start discussing how the Agreement operates in practice.

What are the key provisions of the BBNJ Agreement?

The Agreement’s principal aim is to protect the marine environment and ensure that benefits from marine genetic resources are shared fairly. It places a duty on parties to act as ‘ocean stewards’, considering the needs of present and future generations and respecting the rights and traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

Its key provisions fall into four broad areas:

1. Area-based management tools, including Marine Protected Areas. The Agreement establishes a process and tools for countries to propose, consult on and monitor protected zones in the high seas, currently less than 1% of which lie under full or high protection. These tools are central to delivering the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30×30 target of conserving 30% of the Earth’s surface by 2030 and also support the Sustainable Development Goal 14 – Life Below Water. The Agreement also empowers the COP to take emergency measures when a natural phenomenon or human-caused disaster has caused, or is likely to cause, serious or irreversible harm to marine biological diversity in an area of the high seas. Importantly, the Agreement does not yet specify whether these protected areas will be governed by the Secretariat, the COP, a committee or a group of states: this is a question the first COP meeting will need to address.
2. Environmental impact and strategic assessments. An environmental impact assessment is a structured review of a proposed activity’s likely environmental effects, conducted before the activity goes ahead so that harmful impacts can be avoided, mitigated or managed. Parties must conduct such an assessment before undertaking activities that may cause significant pollution or harmful changes in the high seas. Strategic assessments of plans and programmes for activities are also required. Beyond risk management, these provisions can encourage systematic collection of ocean data, addressing the fact that only a small portion of the ocean is currently mapped. Understanding of ocean ecosystems and the impacts of human activities on them is limited, which constrains the ability to predict and address issues such as marine heatwaves, species loss, acidification and algal blooms. The threshold for triggering a full assessment remains ambiguous in the text, however, and detailed standards are still to be developed by the Agreement’s Scientific and Technical Body.
3. Marine genetic resources and benefit-sharing. Marine genetic resources are biological materials from the ocean: for example, plant, animal or microbial materials that have actual or potential commercial or scientific value, with applications ranging from pharmaceuticals and cosmetics to biotechnology and food products. Parties can collect these resources, along with the digital sequence information derived from them (essentially the genetic data, such as DNA sequences, extracted from biological samples). But no country can claim sovereign rights over them, meaning they cannot be treated as the exclusive property of any one state. Both monetary benefits (such as royalties on commercial products) and non-monetary benefits (such as access to research data, samples and training) arising from their use must be shared. How this works in practice, including the contested scope of digital sequence information, has been left to the COP and a dedicated committee to develop. Disagreement centres on whether benefit-sharing should apply only to physical samples or also to the genetic data once it has been digitised and circulated through public databases. Fishing and military activities fall outside the scope of these provisions.
4. Capacity-building, technology transfer and finance. Developing countries, particularly small island developing states and the least developed countries, are to receive support on preferential terms responsive to their needs. Technology and capacity-building support for developing countries can take several forms including financial, institutional and scientific capability-building, knowledge-sharing, and regulatory and infrastructural support. Funding will draw on multiple sources, including a Voluntary Trust Fund, a Special Fund (to which developed country parties will contribute annually), the Global Environment Facility, and additional funds approved by the COP. Several practical questions remain open for the first COP meeting and beyond: which countries count as ‘developed’ for the purposes of contributions, the eligibility criteria and simplified application procedures for developing parties to access preferential funding, and how monetary benefits from marine genetic resources will feed into the funding system.

How is the Agreement governed?

The COP is the Agreement’s highest decision-making body, meeting annually to set rules, guidelines and governance arrangements. Decisions are made by consensus where possible, but a two-thirds majority is sufficient where it is not. This is a safeguard against a small number of countries blocking progress, which has been a recurring problem in other consensus-based multilateral negotiations. The COP must also review the Agreement’s adequacy and effectiveness within five years of entry into force, and periodically thereafter.

Supporting the COP is a Secretariat, whose location is yet to be determined, as well as its Clearing-House Mechanism: an open-access platform where parties disclose information on protected areas, environmental impact assessments, marine genetic resources, digital sequence information, capacity-building and traditional knowledge. The Mechanism is designed to support stakeholder oversight and transparency, not just data exchange. Each batch of marine genetic resources collected receives a unique identifier through the platform, allowing tracking through to commercialisation and fair and equitable benefit-sharing.

Five specialised bodies support the COP:

• A Scientific and Technical Body of multidisciplinary experts, advising on issues from environmental impact assessment standards to area-based management tools and emergency measures
• An Access and Benefit-Sharing Committee, guiding the fair and equitable distribution of benefits from marine genetic resources as well as providing advice, legal frameworks and institutions for the collection and use of marine genetic resources and digital sequence information
• A Finance Committee, tracking funding needs and overseeing fund mobilisation, allocation and accountability
• A Capacity-Building and Transfer of Marine Technology Committee, supporting developing parties in determining their needs and priorities for capacity-building and technology, providing guidance on forms of capacity-building and marine technology, and reviewing the support needed and mobilised
• An Implementation and Compliance Committee, which works in a facilitative, non-adversarial manner to facilitate implementation and promote compliance with agreement at both the individual and systemic levels.

The Agreement does not yet provide for formal consultation between these bodies on overlapping matters such as finance, conservation, monitoring and benefit-sharing. Clarifying how they will work together is likely to be an early task for the COP.

This Explainer was written by Himanshu Pabreja and Franka Huhn and edited by Georgina Kyriacou.