The experiences of establishing climate and biodiversity funds through transitional committees and working groups offer lessons in how the High Seas Treaty process could succeed.
The Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement), also known as the High Seas Treaty, entered into force on 17 January 2026. The first Conference of the Parties (COP1) must now take decisions to operationalise the financial mechanism the Agreement established, including the establishment of a new global fund to support developing State Parties to implement it.
Getting this right matters. Poorly designed financial mechanisms can take years to become functional, diverting energy and goodwill that could otherwise go into designing and implementing practical conservation and sustainable use projects. COP1 has the opportunity to learn from previous experiences — and recent multilateral climate and biodiversity funds offer directly relevant lessons.
The BBNJ Agreement established three discrete funds under its financial mechanism:
A Voluntary Trust Fund, which supports developing State representatives to participate in meetings related to the Agreement.
A Global Environment Facility (GEF) Trust Fund; and
A new fund called the Special Fund to support developing State Parties to implement the Agreement, fund capacity-building and the transfer of marine technology, and support conservation and sustainable use programmes by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
A recurring challenge arises when a treaty body creates a new funding mechanism such as the Special Fund. Treaty bodies are generally well-suited to agreeing on frameworks, principles and objectives. They are less suited to producing the operational detail - scope, authorities, procedures - that a fund needs to function. The governing board of the fund is the obvious place to make those fine-grained decisions, but it cannot operate until a governing instrument sets out its basic powers and procedures.
This creates a gap between the broad principles set out in the treaty and the normal operational decisions that can be taken by the board. One approach to bridging the gap is an ad hoc committee with limited membership — commonly known as a transitional committee (TC) — mandated to convert framework principles into a working governing instrument. The second approach is an ad hoc open-ended working group (OEWG) that all governments that are Parties to the agreement can participate in. BBNJ negotiators are currently considering both approaches.
What follows draws on experience of how three multilateral environmental funds have been established, including the:
The Transitional Committee for the Green Climate Fund (GCF TC), established under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which operated in 2011.
The Transitional Committee for the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD TC), also under the UNFCCC, which operated in 2023.
The Open-ended Working Group on Benefit-sharing from the Use of Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources (WGDSI) which established the Cali Fund under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which operated in 2023 and 2024.
The analysis draws on desk research, interviews with TC and WG members and advisers, and direct participation in those processes.
Both the TC and OEWG models have successfully delivered on their mandates and been perceived as inclusive and legitimate by Parties and other stakeholders. With such a limited sample size, it is hard to say that one is objectively better than the other. Rather, the preferred option is likely to depend on the expectations of the Parties, the culture of the regime, the mandate from the COP, and other similar intangibles. However, where the mandate from the COP is clear and the Parties are comfortable working with constituency-based representation, the TC model may be a more effective approach to resolving contested issues and delivering a fully formed governing instrument. Conversely, where the COP mandate is vague, critical political questions are unresolved, and legitimacy based on representation is contested, the OEWG may be preferable. The fact that the WGDSI delivered only a heavily bracketed text that required substantial COP negotiations to finalize raises concerns that the OEWG model may be better suited to surfacing areas of disagreement than fully resolving them.
The GCF TC operated with a relatively narrow mandate. By the time its work began, the COP had already decided that the fund would be standalone and have an independent secretariat. This allowed the TC to focus on technical and operational detail rather than foundational architecture.
The FRLD TC and the WGDSI faced much broader mandates: they had to make recommendations not only on the funds themselves but also broader arrangements related to loss and damage financing and benefit sharing from the use of digital sequence information, respectively. Furthermore, the COPs increased the workload of the FRLD TC and the WGDSI by failing to take decisions on key governance issues such as board composition, host of the secretariat, and the trustee. The FRLD TC spent significant time debating the scope of its own mandate before it could focus on deliverables, and ultimately required five meetings to complete its work, two more than initially mandated.
The lesson is clear. The broader and more ambiguous the mandate, the slower and more contested the process.
For the BBNJ Special Fund, key architectural questions — including whether the fund will be an independent body or hosted within an existing institution — were not resolved in the Agreement. COP1 has an opportunity to reach agreement on these foundational issues upfront, which would allow a TC to focus on the governing instrument itself.
The FRLD TC learned from the GCF experience in one important respect: it presented its draft decision and governing instrument as a final package, with an understanding that it would not be reopened and was adopted without amendment at COP28. By contrast, the GCF TC’s proposed governing instrument was adopted without changes, but there were significant negotiations over the accompanying COP decision which added additional clarifications. Furthermore, the GCF Governing Instrument left several governance questions — including decision making in the absence of consensus and the fund's ability to accept contributions from non-governmental sources — unresolved, some of which remained outstanding for years. The WGDSI was unable to even agree on a clean text, recommending a heavily bracketed text, which COP16 had to continue negotiations on before it could be adopted.
The WGDSI was open to all Parties to the CBD, which allowed universal participation but did not guarantee balanced representation. Both TCs gave a majority of seats to developing country Parties — 63% for the GCF TC (out of 40 members) and 58% for the FRLD TC (out of 24 members) — with regional allocations that included specific provision for Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries.
For the FRLD TC, the absence of regional allocation criteria for developed country Parties created problems. Disagreements about how to divide seats among developed country groupings delayed the first meeting. Being explicit about regional allocation for all groupings, not only developing country Parties, could help avoid this.
Both TCs were led by co-chairs, with one from a developed country Party and one (or two, for the GCF TC) from developing country Parties. For the FRLD TC, one co-chair took on the role as a full-time commitment — an approach interviewees identified as best practice. Full-time co-chair leadership allowed focused attention on the process and helped maintain momentum between sessions. The WGDSI was Chaired by the COP15 Presidency but substantive work was conducted by a Committee of the Whole led by two co-chairs, one from a developed country Party and one from a developing country Party.
Allowing voting rather than requiring consensus for all decisions is worth considering. Both TCs and the WGDSI operated by consensus, consistent with UNFCCC and CBD norms. This ensures buy-in from all Parties, but gives countries an effective veto, which can slow the process and reduce ambition. Interviewees noted that BBNJ has a less entrenched consensus norm, which may create more flexibility.
The FRLD TC was mandated to meet three times. It required five. The GCF TC had no mandated meeting allocation, but met four times.
Several factors contributed to schedule overruns in the FRLD process: delays in nominating committee members, the breadth of the mandate, and the northern hemisphere summer holidays leading to loss of momentum. A minimum of four meetings is likely necessary for the BBNJ, with sufficient time for both formal sessions and informal exchange. The FRLD TC working arrangements set a minimum of four days per meeting, including one day for informal discussion. Avoiding clashes with major holiday periods is a practical step that can prevent delay.
Tabling the draft text helped focus the negotiations. In the FRLD TC a Party proposed a draft text at the third meeting which helped the negotiations switch gears from abstract discussions to more focus on the decision text. The GCF TC did not see a full draft text proposal from the co-chairs until its final meeting, and some committee members did not feel able to endorse it.
Technical support is essential — but must be designed carefully
Both TCs established Technical Support Units (TSUs), drawing seconded staff from the UNFCCC Secretariat, relevant UN agencies, international financial institutions, and other multilateral funds.
The value of having dedicated technical support was not in question. The challenges arose in implementation. Some interviewees noted that TSUs suffered from unclear mandates and responsibilities, insufficient capacity because staff were seconded part-time, and potential conflicts of interest given the interests of their home institutions.
The norm in both the GCF and FRLD TCs and WGDSI was to disseminate documentation such as agendas, discussion papers, reports online, as well as to webcast proceedings. This allowed all Parties and other stakeholders to keep track of negotiations even if they were unable to join in person, helping to create a more inclusive process where everyone could see how decisions were reached.
Both TCs and the WGDSI allowed observers to attend meetings and take the floor. This was not simply a transparency measure as observer participation gave the processes a wider range of perspectives and recommendations to draw on. It also helped build constituencies that supported the funds during subsequent pledging and appropriations processes. Both the CBD and BBNJ give Indigenous Peoples and local communities enhanced participation as rightsholders, not just stakeholders.
Based on these lessons, we offer 10 recommendations toward COP1 for the process to operationalise the Special Fund.
Developed as part of the BBNJ Finance Advisory Group, hosted by the UNSW Centre for Sustainable Development Reform.
