Brief on the Clearing House Mechanism of the BBNJ Agreement

The Clearing House Mechanism (CHM) is the centralized digital infrastructure that will function as the “nervous system” of the BBNJ Agreement. It will operate as an open access, web-based platform, managed by the Secretariat and assign a standardized “BBNJ” batch identifier (BI) and receive and publish notifications on marine genetic resources (MGR) and their digital sequence information (DSI) at the pre-collection, post-collection, and utilization stages of scientific research.

As implementation of the BBNJ Agreement moves forward, decisions will need to be made on how CHM notifications will be executed in practice.