The BBNJ Challenge: How Do You Make Decisions for Biodiversity on the High Seas?

The high seas are vast, connected, and constantly changing. No single country, organization, research program, or discipline can observe and understand all of them. Yet decisions still have to be made: where biodiversity needs protection, how activities may affect it, whether management measures are working, where more information is needed, and how conditions are changing over time.

That is the central challenge of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement. How do you make good decisions about a system that no one can observe, understand, or manage alone?

The answer cannot simply be to collect more data. It has to be possible to turn the knowledge already being produced—along with new observations as they emerge—into evidence that can support decisions.

The problem is not a lack of information. It is making sense of what already exists.

BBNJ decisions will draw on information produced by many different sectors and organizations. Fisheries may hold long-term observations of species and populations. Shipping and transportation generate information about vessel activity and environmental conditions. Environmental assessments may document habitats and potential impacts. Deep-sea exploration and extraction can generate new environmental observations. Research programs, conservation organizations, governments, and communities each contribute other pieces of the picture. Pharmaceutical and bioprospecting interests may generate or rely on additional information about marine biodiversity.

For the people responsible for making decisions, this creates a practical problem: the evidence they need is often distributed across different systems, methodologies, organizations, locations, and time periods.

Bringing that evidence together can require substantial technical expertise and staff time. Data may need to be found, cleaned, standardized, validated, reconciled, analyzed, mapped, and interpreted before they can answer a decision-maker's question. By the time the process is complete, new information may already be available—and the work may have to begin again.

This is expensive, slow, and difficult to sustain at the scale BBNJ requires.

The challenge is turning the knowledge that already exists—and the knowledge being collected every day—into evidence that can actually support decisions.

How do you bring different knowledge together without losing its context?

Information from different sources cannot simply be combined into one large dataset and assumed to be comparable.

Observations may have been collected for different purposes, using different methods, at different spatial and temporal scales. Species may be recorded using different taxonomies. Environmental assessments may use different indicators. Research programs may have different sampling designs and levels of effort.

The answer is not to erase those differences. It is to preserve the information needed to understand them while creating a common infrastructure through which they can be connected.

That means keeping observations linked to their methods, metadata, provenance, location, time, and other relevant context. It means making it possible to understand where information came from, how it was collected, how it was validated, and what it can—and cannot—be used to answer.

eOceans provides that underlying infrastructure. Data can remain connected to the projects, people, methods, and context that produced them while becoming usable across broader questions.

Instead of starting from scratch every time someone asks a new question, the evidence can continue to build.

How do you collaborate without giving up sovereignty?

BBNJ requires collaboration across countries, institutions, sectors, and organizations. But collaboration does not mean that everyone needs to own, control, or publish the same information.

Different contributors have different responsibilities, rights, policies, sensitivities, and reasons for collecting information. Some information may be openly available. Some may require permission. Some may be sensitive. Some may need to remain within the organization that collected it.

A useful system therefore needs to support collaboration without requiring everything to become public or centrally owned.

eOceans can provide common infrastructure while allowing contributors to determine how their information is managed, accessed, used, and shared. The objective is not to create one giant database controlled by one organization. It is to make it possible for different contributors to participate in a connected system while retaining appropriate control over their own information.

Sovereignty and interoperability do not have to be opposites.

How do you make expertise go further?

BBNJ decision-making requires expertise across ecology, taxonomy, fisheries, environmental assessment, statistics, data science, conservation, policy, remote sensing, and many other fields.

That expertise is scarce and expensive. It should be focused on the questions that actually require expert judgment—not consumed by repeatedly cleaning datasets, reconciling formats, rebuilding workflows, recreating maps, or preparing essentially the same analyses and reports.

This is where automation matters.

eOceans is designed to be automation-first, with AI where it is most valuable. Standardization, validation, quality control, metadata management, mapping, analysis, and reporting can be built into repeatable workflows. AI can assist with tasks where it adds value, while expert judgment remains central to scientific interpretation and decision-making.

The goal is not to replace expertise. It is to make expertise more scalable.

One expert should be able to contribute to more projects, answer more questions, and maintain more continuous understanding because the surrounding machinery does not have to be rebuilt every time.

How do you reduce the cost of understanding?

Monitoring the high seas will always require substantial investment. Ships, equipment, field teams, laboratories, researchers, analysts, data managers, and long-term observation programs all cost money.

But data collection is only one part of that investment.

Organizations also spend considerable time and money designing workflows, managing data, standardizing information, validating observations, conducting analyses, producing maps and figures, writing reports, and updating those outputs as new information arrives.

If every project, organization, country, or reporting requirement rebuilds that machinery, much of the investment is spent repeatedly solving the same underlying problems.

The opportunity is to make the value of each observation grow over time.

With eOceans, a workflow can be established once and then continue to support new observations, new locations, new species, new questions, new analyses, and new reports. Instead of paying repeatedly to recreate the infrastructure around the data, organizations can build on what has already been done.

The goal is not simply to reduce the cost of collecting information. It is to get more value from the information already being collected.

How do you understand biodiversity in the context of everything else happening in the ocean?

BBNJ decisions cannot be based on biodiversity observations in isolation.

Decision-makers may need to understand species and populations alongside habitats, environmental conditions, pollution, fisheries, shipping, climate-related changes, seabed activities, protected areas, and other human pressures.

The challenge is not simply having each of these datasets. It is being able to connect them when the question requires it.

What is the condition of an area? What has changed? What activities are occurring there? What pressures are associated with those changes? What areas may require additional protection? Are management measures achieving their intended outcomes?

Those questions cross datasets, disciplines, sectors, and geographic boundaries.

eOceans is designed around that reality. Observations from different projects and data sources can remain connected to their original context while contributing to a broader understanding of places, species, habitats, activities, and change.

That makes it possible to move from individual observations to an evolving picture of the system.

How do you keep decisions current?

A decision is rarely the end of the process.

Conditions change. Species distributions shift. New activities begin. New research becomes available. Protected areas are established. Management measures change. Environmental conditions fluctuate. Monitoring continues.

If every new decision requires rebuilding the evidence base from the beginning, decision-making will always lag behind the system it is intended to manage.

The alternative is to build a record that keeps developing.

With eOceans, new observations can be added to established projects and workflows. Validation, analysis, maps, and reports can update as the underlying information grows. Previous work remains connected rather than becoming an isolated report on a shelf.

That creates a different model for environmental decision-making:

Observe. Organize. Validate. Connect. Analyze. Understand. Decide. Act. Monitor. Learn.

Then do it again.

From fragmented evidence to continuous understanding

The BBNJ challenge is not simply about producing more information. It is about creating the capacity to use the information that already exists, connect it with what is being collected now, and keep that understanding current.

That requires collaboration without requiring common ownership. It requires standardization without erasing context. It requires expertise without wasting expert time on repetitive infrastructure. And it requires better use of existing investments rather than continually rebuilding the machinery around them.

eOceans provides that infrastructure.

It gives organizations a way to continuously turn observations into usable evidence across species, habitats, sectors, locations, countries, and time—while maintaining the context, provenance, permissions, and expertise that make the information meaningful.

For BBNJ, the opportunity is not to create one system that knows everything.

It is to create the infrastructure that allows many people, organizations, countries, and disciplines to contribute to a continuously improving understanding of the high seas—and to use that understanding to make better-informed decisions as conditions change.

The high seas are too large, too connected, and too dynamic to understand one project at a time.