EBB project main goal is to facilitate sustainable access to marine biodiversity, its associated data, and extractable products for local and international academia and industry users, and to incentivize biodiversity conservation in coastal ecosystems by promoting compliance with Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) regulations derived from the Nagoya Protocol. There are concerns that the added bureaucracy in relation to ABS regulations may be detrimental to Research, Development and innovation activities. In order to promote R&D+I on marine bioresources, the EBB has produced the step-by-step guide “Seek, keep & transfer: A step-by-step guide to ABS compliance when utilizing marine genetic resources”. This guide is a practical to-do-list for individual scientists from academia or private sector conducting research on “marine genetic resources”. This document recommends users to follow a 6-step iterative process by answering some questions in an iterative way. The guide presents action and provides tips for each of the 6 steps.
The guide was developed as the Deliverable 3.4 “Best Practice Guidelines (BPGs) on Accessing MBRs for commercial research in compliance with ABS Regulations”. This guide is delivered by the EBB project with support of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC-ERIC) ABS Working-Group.