Current efforts to price carbon and issue blue bonds rely on a biological inventory where 90 percent of marine species remain undiscovered. This data gap undermines the accuracy of natural capital accounting and the effectiveness of marine protected areas.
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The point about the BBNJ Agreement is the real kicker here. You cannot have a functional regulatory framework for the high seas if the baseline data is missing. We are essentially trying to write procurement rules for a warehouse where we have not even done a full inventory of the stock.
Exactly. It makes blue bonds look like a gamble. If we do not know what species are actually sequestering the carbon or how they interact, the pricing is just a guess based on a few known variables.
The mention of deep sea mining is where this gets practical. Companies are applying for permits in areas where only 10 percent of species are identified. How do you calculate the actual environmental risk or the cost of mitigation when the variables are unknown?
It is the same problem as early renewable builds where the interconnection studies were based on outdated maps. You cannot manage what you have not measured. The 13.5 year lag for specimen description is a massive bottleneck for any real time climate policy.
