Back in January, I wrote a blog on what the BBNJ Agreement can and cannot do for fisheries. My main points then, and I have not changed my mind, were that BBNJ does not manage fisheries; RFMOs do; that RFMOs are far better placed to support BBNJ than the other way round; and that adopting a treaty is the easy part. UNCLOS is over 40 years old, and we are still chasing flag states to do what they signed up for.
So I was pleased to read a new paper in Frontiers in Marine Science by Wanwoo Nam, from the Department of Law at Jeonju University in Korea: Implementing BBNJ across fisheries institutions: policy options for interoperable ocean governance.
It is open access. And it asks a question much closer to my day job than most of what gets written on BBNJ: now that the treaty is in force (since 17 January 2026), how do you actually connect biodiversity information with the people who license vessels, inspect them in port and decide what enters a market, without anyone stepping on anyone else's mandate?
Full disclosure before I go on: the paper leans heavily on a 2025 WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs article on regional coordination against IUU fishing, led by Katherine Auld, which I co-authored. So I am not entirely neutral, but I think I would have liked this paper anyway.
The problem, as Nam frames it
Nam starts where I would. IUU fishing is not mainly a problem of too few rules or too little enforcement effort. We already have flag-state duties under UNCLOS, UNFSA, RFMOs, the IPOA-IUU, the PSMA, catch documentation schemes, market controls, and a growing set of IMO safety and identity instruments. The problem is that these tools are spread across institutions, agencies, databases and decision points. As he puts it, a vessel can move faster than the information needed to determine who it is.
BBNJ adds another layer: area-based management tools (ABMTs), environmental impact assessments, capacity building and the Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM). But the treaty is explicit that it will coexist with what is already in place. Article 5(2) says it must not undermine existing instruments and bodies; Article 22 requires respect for the competences of those bodies on ABMTs; Article 29 sets rules for interaction with other EIA processes; Article 47(6)(c) tells the COP to promote cooperation; and Article 51 tells the CHM to link to existing databases rather than replace them. That is the point I was trying to make in January, but Nam makes it with article numbers, which lawyers will find more convincing than my blog.
He then identifies three kinds of fragmentation. Semantic: different identifiers, data fields and reporting intervals, so data can be accessible and still useless. Institutional: fisheries, coast guard, customs, ports and environment ministries each hold a slice of the picture. Temporal: by the time something is verified, the vessel or the catch has moved on. Anyone who has stood on a wharf with three agencies holding three versions of the same vessel's name will recognise all of them.
Four options, six criteria
The core of the paper compares four governance architectures against six criteria (legal compatibility, ecological decision support, administrative feasibility, information governance, distributional equity and adaptability):
Autonomous implementation. Everyone keeps doing their own thing. Legally clean, but basically the status quo, with manual translation between systems, duplicated records, and contact via personal phone numbers.
Centralised integration. One global platform or coordinating authority. This runs straight into a competence problem, since nobody gave BBNJ authority over fisheries, and concentrating data magnifies the confidentiality and cybersecurity risks. He notes that even FAO's GIES, under the PSMA, tiers its access because the forms contain personal and commercial information.
Sectoral liaison. MoUs, focal points and working groups. Legally fine, but it doesn't scale, and the agreements tend to commit parties to cooperate without specifying what data, when, in what format, or what happens after a referral. I have read my share of those MoUs.
Federated interoperability with phased implementation. Each institution keeps its database, mandate and legal tests, connected through a thin layer of common identifiers, minimum metadata (source, time, confidence, legal status), standard referral categories and feedback loops, with the CHM acting as a gateway.
There is no scoring. The logic is non-compensatory: an option that fails on legal competence is out, regardless of how well it does otherwise. The federated model is carried forward because it is the only one that preserves distributed competence, provides a routine pathway for information to reach the body legally able to act on it, and can be implemented incrementally and reversed if it does not work. Nam is careful, almost to a fault, to say this is a conditional proposition to be tested, not a proven design.
The idea I liked most is the distinction between "can be informed by" and "is bound by". BBNJ information can inform ecological priorities without determining that fishing was illegal. An RFMO compliance finding can inform a port's risk assessment without dictating a domestic sanction. A safety inspection can confirm a vessel's identity or certificates without proving a fisheries violation. Facts can shift; legal judgments remain with the regime that owns them. This matters now that STCW-F is in force and the Cape Town Agreement comes into force in 2027, because I already hear people treating safety deficiencies as IUU indicators.
Related to this, he insists that a referral should distinguish a request to verify from a conclusion that a violation occurred, and that missing data must not be treated as evidence of illegality, especially for small-scale fleets that cannot carry the same tracking kit as industrial vessels. Readers of my recent rant about desk experts and remote monitoring will know why I nodded at that.
The roadmap
The paper proposes a phased path tied to the BBNJ calendar: mapping sources, identifiers and mandates before the first COP (11 to 22 January 2027); using COP1 to adopt principles on mandate protection, provenance, correction and access; then technical specifications in 2027 and 2028, and narrow pilots in roughly 2028 to 2030, with a parallel capacity and equity track. Each phase has a stop rule: if an interface cannot be lawfully sourced, corrected or secured, do not build it.
The most concrete proposal is on Article 22(4), which lets the COP develop a mechanism regarding existing ABMTs. Nam suggests this be a registry and referral protocol, not a regulator: index existing measures such as RFMO closures or VME protections, link each to its authoritative source, record its boundaries, status and version, name a contact point, and set up consultation where a BBNJ measure overlaps with or leaves a gap next to an existing one. It would not fold existing measures into BBNJ law or move fisheries competence to the COP. That, in effect, puts RFMOs at the centre of how ABMTs work on the high seas, which is exactly where they should be.
Where I would push a bit
First, this is a desk exercise built on ideal types, which Nam openly admits. The Asia-Pacific is used as a "stress test", but only in general terms. In the Pacific, we have run something close to federated interoperability for decades through FFA: a regional vessel register, regional VMS, harmonised minimum terms and conditions for access, and the Niue Treaty Subsidiary Agreement for sharing MCS information between members, all alongside WCPFC's own records. That is real evidence of what works and what does not, and the analysis omits it.
Second, the bottleneck is rarely the interface standard agreed in New York. It is the national administration. In many small island states, the same handful of people handle licensing, port inspections, and observer coordination, and will now also serve as the BBNJ focal point. A validated referral is only as good as the person at the wharf on a Friday afternoon who can act on it. Minimum metadata does not address staffing shortages. As I said in January, RFMO secretariats will also need resources and the right people to engage with all of this.
Third, the timeline. Pilots by 2030 with willing RFMOs sounds reasonable on paper. But the PSMA has been in force since 2016, and getting basic port state information to flow reliably between states is still hard work. Interoperability across regimes will not move faster than interoperability within one.
None of this undermines the argument. If anything, the paper is a more formal version of what I was trying to say in January: BBNJ can strengthen fisheries governance not by becoming an enforcement regime, but by improving how information reaches the institutions already competent to act. Interoperability is the unglamorous plumbing of ocean governance, and Nam is right: the plumbing needs designing before anyone builds another big, shiny database. Ideally, also before someone puts another whale on the press release.