Side Event
Marine Genetic Resources and the Nagoya Protocol: Preparing the Marine Scientific Community
Organizer
PharmaSea consortium, Micro B3 consortium, European Commission, IUCN, Université Catholique de Louvain,
Date and Time
27 February 2014 13:15 - 14:45
The oceans cover more that 70% of the Earth’s surface, harbour more than 95% of its biosphere and are home to more than 34 of the 36 living animal phyla. Its enormous biological diversity makes the marine environment a vast and unique reservoir of undiscovered genetic information and biochemical material. This drives the concept of “blue biotechnology”, which aims at fostering research on unique and novel biological compounds or principles from the marine environment for industrial application. The EU 7th Framework Programme (FP7) is funding two international collaborative marine biodiscovery projects; PharmaSea and Micro B3. With the support of the European Commission, project partners eCoast, IUCN and Université Catholique de Louvain will present some initiatives of the two projects that contribute to the good implementation of the Nagoya Protocol within European marine biodiscovery and biotechnology research and development on marine genetic resources from areas within national jurisdiction. These include: - In relation to Articles 19 and 20 of the Nagoya Protocol, tools to facilitate lawful access and utilization of MGR from areas within national jurisdiction, such as a biodiscovery portal for MGR users, model agreements to enable access to MGR and their transfer, and voluntary guidelines and best practices/standards for MGR practitioners who are bound both by the Nagoya Protocol as well as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea with regard to areas within national jurisdiction; - In relation to Article 21 of the Nagoya Protocol, measures to raise the awareness of the importance of MGR and related access and benefit-sharing issues which include, amongst others, the development of viewpoints explaining to the scientific community the impact the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol will have on MGR research and development and also the setup of an ABS consultation desk for researchers involved in the respective EU projects.