Negotiations to implement area-based management tools beyond national jurisdiction: the scientific community’s view

• Autor(a) principal: Caldeira, Mariana Piauilino
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/36280
• topic: Areas beyond national jurisdiction; Biodiversity conservation; BBNJ agreement; Ocean governance; Sentiment analyses

For the 61% of the ocean that lies in areas beyond national jurisdiction, the United Nations is currently negotiating a new international legally-binding instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity (BBNJ agreement). Area-based management tools, including networks of marine protected areas (MPAs), play an important role in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services in the current context of multiple threats to the ocean and are, therefore, one of the main components of the BBNJ agreement. The aim of this work is to assess the scientific community´s perspective, throughout the period of negotiations, on the potential of BBNJ agreement to promote the creation of new area-based management tools, including MPAs, fulfilling the exist gaps in ocean governance. A systematic literature search, from 2006 to 2020, was performed using specific keywords. This search resulted in 80 publications in which strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O) and threats (T) were detected and summarized into a total of 608 key messages. A SWOT analysis was applied to understand the strengths and weaknesses associated with the agreement and to identify external factors that may influence its effectiveness. Also, those key messages were identified according to one of the six categories defined in this work: I. Knowledge, II. Cooperation/Conflicts, III. Coherence, IV. Monitoring, V. Decision-making and VI. Capacity. Further, a Sentiment Analysis (SA) based on a lexicon approach was applied to the key messages to better understand the patterns of the scientific community´s perspective. SA is a field of Natural Language Processing, which focuses on comprehending opinions, feelings, attitudes, and emotions expressed in texts and classifying them according to a polarity (positive, negative or neutral) in attitude. Our results show that the agreement has been perceived by the scientific community as an opportunity (more than half of the key messages) for conserving and achieving sustainable use of biodiversity. However, the agreement did not prove to have solid and coherent provisions to ensure effective measures, which is reflected by the small number of identified strengths. We also observed that the number of weaknesses and threats increased throughout time, whereas the perceived opportunities tended to decrease in the final stage of the negotiations. This is in accordance with the SA results that show that the sentiment of the scientific community has changed over the years, with the calculated score significantly decreasing as the negotiations between States proceed. In summary, our results suggest that although the BBNJ agreement is recognized as having the potential to promote conservation in areas beyond national jurisdiction, core issues discussed by the scientific community must be reviewed before the conclusion of the new agreement. Further, it is suggested that sentiment analysis is a useful tool to facilitate the integration of different perspectives into the final provisions of the agreement. The identification of positive and negative opinions will ultimately enable better solutions to address governance challenges in upcoming conferences of the BBNJ agreement, fulfilling its ambition towards a conserved marine environment.