My thanks to the co-chairs, Ambassador Janine Coye-Felson of Belize, and Mr. Adam McCarthy of Australia.
We all understand this Third Session of the Preparatory Commission for the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement) is critical. Our ocean needs action now. We must urgently move to implementation to safeguard biodiversity, ensure sustainable use and benefit sharing of the high seas. Success will depend on efficient delivery, strengthened capacity and sustained financing.
For more than 50 years, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has provided institutional support to treaty secretariats. Each of these secretariats operates with the autonomy that is being called for in this room. Each operates with functional, financial and operational independence.
Each treaty secretariat is autonomous; each treaty secretariat is not an integral part of the UNEP management or organisational structure. Each secretariat operates with functional and financial independence under the oversight of the COP. But each treaty secretariat receives UNEP support that Member States are speaking of here today: recruitment and staff management under the UN staff rules, procedural support when requested, accreditation and registration infrastructure, pension fund membership, payroll, audit services, procurement rules and more.
For early impact, it is essential that the BBNJ Agreement pulls experience from all other conventions that have gone before it. This therefore begins with rapidly establishing institutional arrangements to support science, to support decision-making and capacity building that you have identified as a priority. To make this happen, the BBNJ will need a strong, efficient and independent Secretariat. UNEP is ready to serve as the institutional host of this Secretariat.
That does not mean physical location. For 34 years the Convention on Biological Diversity hosted geographically by Canada and institutionally by UNEP has spurred conservation and sustainable use in action.
The UN80 process is seeking to ensure coherence of mandates and enhanced impact. Hosting with UNEP would provide a stable, costeffective and strategically coherent arrangement in line with what Member States seek in UN80 avoiding duplicate structures; reducing overheads by leveraging existing, tested systems; and ensuring accountability, transparency and integrity under the overall oversight and direction of the Conference of Parties (COP). That stands for all the 15 Conventions and three science-policy platforms that UNEP has the privilege of hosting today.
UNEP has decades of experience, hosting 15 Multilateral Environmental Agreements and supporting three intergovernmental science-policy platforms. We host many agreements closely linked to the BBNJ: from the Biodiversity Convention; the Montreal Protocol, the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Conventions on chemicals and waste, the Minamata Convention, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Convention on Migratory Species, and, as you may know, we are currently negotiating the new plastic pollution treaty.
We also host the Regional Seas Conventions, dealing essentially with biodiversity within national jurisdiction. The eldest of these Conventions is more than 51 years old. All 18 Regional Seas Conventions span 146 UN Members States, and therefore Member States have deep experience in their collaboration with UNEP on marine and related areas.
By being administered institutionally by UNEP, the BBNJ Secretariat would be within a trusted ecosystem of biodiversity, pollution and oceans expertise with established experience for cooperation, science-policy exchange and early implementation all while retaining functional, operational and financial independence as prescribed by each of the COPs.
UNEP will support Parties irrespective of the secretariats physical location. Many of the current Secretariats that UNEP hosts are outside of Nairobi in Bonn, Geneva and Montreal and across the world.
UNEP respectfully submits that UNEPs mandate given to us by Member States, our experience and our institutional architecture make us a very efficient and strategic option for the BBNJ secretariat. I invite Parties to consider all options, including and I quote from earlier papers, models of existing treaty secretariats administered by a UN entity, such as those administered by UNEP.
