Assessing the legal protection of marine biodiversity: an interdisciplinary approach combining law and artificial intelligence.

The BIOMA thesis is part of the Nawras project (Assessing Ocean Legal Protection using AI) conducted by Cadi Ayyad University (Morocco) and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (France).

Its aim is to respond to a twofold observation: on the one hand, the state of marine biodiversity keeps getting worse; on the other hand, the number of texts aimed at protecting it is increasing significantly. However, it is still difficult to link these two elements effectively.

The poster will therefore present this innovative project which, by combining research in legal science and artificial intelligence, aims to develop indicators to assess “where, when and how the law protects marine biodiversity”.

These indicators will make it possible to represent graphically the content of legal texts prohibiting human activities that are particularly harmful to biodiversity.

The various construction phases, in particular aspects relating to scope and operationalization, will be detailed. This information will be used to assess the content and implementation of the laws, supplemented by a comparison with analyses of the state of ecosystems.

In this work, AI plays a key role, as the model used enables automated data extraction within documents through the use of automated language processing (ALP).

The poster will illustrate the methodology by analyzing and evaluating the ban on bottom trawling, a fishing method with disastrous consequences for marine biodiversity. 

The first results presented will demonstrate the usefulness of this innovative method and its contribution to observing, understanding and evaluating the legal protection of marine biodiversity.