The European Blue Biobank (EBB) project, the first INTERREG Atlantic Area Project lead by the Marine Research Centre of the University of Vigo, aims at understanding the limitations imposed by the new regulations for access to genetic resources (derived from Nagoya Protocol).
EBB involves a European multidisciplinary team that comprises some of the world´s most important marine culture collections, marine biotechnology clusters and marine biotechnology companies and the government departments responsible for access to genetic resources – the ABS Competent National Authorities (CNAs).
EBB also intends to prepare stations belonging to the European Marine Biological Resource Centre, EMBRC to help their users in complying with the new regulations, with the final goal of facilitating sustainable access to marine biodiversity, its associated data, and extractable products for local and international users.
Likewise, the project aims to help competent national authorities and European authorities for the implementation of these regulations in an efficient way and to raise awareness of the final users of genetic resources about the need to comply with these regulations.
In this sense, the working team of EBB project is currently making a great effort to sensitize the scientific community, and specifically those researchers studying the properties of biological resources. Antonio Villanueva at ECIMAT first presented EBB project on 19th February 2019, to an audience of scientists from CIM-UVigo, IEO and CSIC, with the conference “ABS: are you talking about my car brakes?“.
This was the first of a series of presentations by EBB coordinating team, in response to the great interest on the topic shown by the research community. On 10th July 2019, Fiz da Costa, Project manager of EBB, and Belén Sánchez, Teacher of International Public Law at University of Vigo and member of EBB, gave the seminars “European Blue Biobank (EBB)” and “Cuestiones jurídicas relativas al acceso y utilización de recursos genéticos: Del Convenio sobre la Diversidad Biológica al Protocolo de Nagoya y su implementación en España”, respectively. After the seminars, researchers from Misión Biológica de Galicia-CSIC of Pontevedra (Spain), IIM-CSIC of Vigo, CETMAR (Vigo) and other institutions, and the public discussed during nearly 3 hours on how Nagoya protocol and its related regulations on affected the implementation of research projects.
On 23 September 2019, Fiz da Costa was invited to the workshop “Procedimientos de cultivo de berberecho”, organized by the University of Aveiro (Portugal) in the frame of the COCKLES project financed by Interreg Atlantic Area programme. He gave the talk “Acceso y utilización de recursos genéticos marinos: nuevas regulaciones y cómo aplicarlas”.