To Protect Vast Expanses of Ocean Beyond All National Boundaries, 60 Nations Must Ratify the Treaty of the High Seas

For the Indigenous Rapa Nui people who live on Easter Island, one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world, the high seas have played an integral role in their daily lives for at least two thousand years. These ocean areas that extend beyond any one country’s national jurisdiction connect their small island—which they also call Rapa Nui—in the South Pacific to their nearest neighbors, all of which are at least 2,000 miles away, including mainland Chile and the Galapagos islands. 

“The high seas are in our DNA,” said Rapa Nui ocean advocate Sebastián Yankovic Pakarati. “It’s where our ancestors, our gods and traditional foods come from,” he said in Cali, Colombia kicking off an event held within the margins of the world’s largest biodiversity summit, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s 16th Conference of the Parties, commonly referred to as COP16. 

The event last month was attended by government leaders from Chile, Panama, Madagascar, Nigeria, Belgium and Germany, as well as philanthropists and non-governmental leaders calling for the swift ratification of a new treaty that provides the first legal pathway to protecting and sustainably managing high seas areas outside of countries’ 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zones. 

The high seas account for two-thirds of the ocean and are widely recognized for providing habitat for key ecosystem functions for diverse marine life, including endangered whales, sharks and turtles that traverse currents and underwater mountain ranges as they move between breeding and foraging grounds. The high seas are also home to carbon-sequestering seagrass beds, deep sea coral reefs and hydrothermal vents, which host unique animal species that do not exist anywhere else on Earth. Yet, only one percent of these waters is protected. 

Industrial fishing, commercial shipping, pollution and climate change are increasingly threatening the cultural values, heritage and livelihoods of Indigenous people and local communities, said Pakarati. 

“We are a small community, eight thousand people. We do not have large boats, only artisanal fishing. But all around us it is full of boats from other nations fishing on the edge of the exclusive economic zone,” Pakarati said. Consequently, local fish stocks are becoming more scarce.

To safeguard these waters and ensure all countries benefit equally from their resources, he said, global governments must ratify the High Seas Treaty, the formal name for which is 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, or the BBNJ Agreement (BBNJ), for short. 

Last year the agreement was adopted by the United Nations after two decades of discussions. But it needs at least 60 countries to ratify it before it can go into effect. To date, more than 100 countries have signed the treaty, signifying their support and intent to ratify. But only 14 countries have ratified it. The goal is to have it ratified by June 2025 during the UN Ocean Conference. It will go into force 120 days after ratification. 

If that happens, the treaty will become the world’s first legal instrument to mandate biodiversity conservation in international waters around the globe. 

“It is the most important new international ocean law to help protect and manage the half of the planet that is found in the high seas,” said Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance, a coalition of more than 60 non-governmental members and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has been advocating for high seas protection since 2011. 

The alliance also co-hosted the high-level side event at COP16. 

“30×30” 

Throughout the two-week conference, which brought together more than 20,000 international delegates, the treaty was repeatedly recognized and lauded as an essential complementary tool to implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMBGF). The framework was adopted last year by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and includes 23 action-oriented targets for halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 and beyond. 

“We know we cannot achieve any of the targets in the framework unless we fully integrate the ocean in our work,” said Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity during a high-level day-long panel held during COP16 on the conservation and sustainable use of oceans. 

Considering the majority of ocean waters exist beyond national boundaries, said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, it is essential that portions of the high seas be protected and sustainably managed. 

“We have to increase political momentum to get BBNJ on the books, to get it ratified and effected,” said Andersen during the ocean panel. “Every moment lost is indeed moments lost for the ocean.”

“It is the most important new international ocean law to help protect and manage the half of the planet that is found in the high seas.”

— Rebecca Hubbard, High Seas Alliance

Nature is disappearing at an alarming rate. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature 2024 Living Planet Report, published last month, the average size of monitored wildlife populations plummeted by 73 percent in just 50 years between 1970-2020. Human activity causing habitat destruction and climate change are driving entire ecosystems to the brink of extinction, according to the report.

Just this week, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced at the U.N. climate conference (COP29) in Azerbaijan that nearly half of all reef-building coral species are at risk of becoming extinct globally due to rising ocean temperatures and other pervasive threats, including pollution, agricultural runoff, unsustainable fishing and disease. 

The consequences of losing such reefs would be ecologically devastating. They support at least a quarter of all marine species, provide food and income for a billion people and protect coastlines from increasingly frequent storm surges. 

One of the framework’s most ambitious goals to curb such biodiversity loss calls for the effective conservation and management of at least 30 percent of lands, inland waters and coastal and marine areas by 2030. That’s the minimum level of protected areas scientists say must be safeguarded in order to stem the twin biodiversity and climate crises our planet is experiencing. 

While nearly 200 countries have committed to achieving this target, often referred to as “30 by 30,” ocean protection is lagging. To date, only around 8 percent of the global ocean is protected, according to the Marine Protection Atlas, an initiative of the Marine Conservation Institute. And only 2 percent of the ocean is highly and fully protected, meaning all destructive or extractive activities are prohibited.

At this rate, it is unlikely that this key biodiversity target will be met, unless governments agree to protect the high seas, said Chile’s minister for the environment, Maisa Rojas, at COP16. 

“We are not going to be able to protect 30 percent of our oceans without BBNJ,” Rojas told audience members at the side event focused on the high seas. 

That’s why, she announced, Chile has launched a new initiative called “BBNJ First Movers” to support governments and other stakeholders in developing proposals for the first generation of marine protected areas that will be established on the high seas. By developing these proposals now, the initiative aims to accelerate the implementation of the treaty once it’s ratified. 

To complement these efforts a group of funders pledged $51.7 million to support stakeholders in creating the governance processes that will be needed to ensure a rapid adoption of proposed high seas marine protected areas. 

“There’s an increasing recognition that investment in ocean conservation and protection is also an investment in climate,” said Jonathan Kelsey, director of the Bloomberg Ocean Fund, a regranting partner of the Bloomberg Ocean Initiative at Bloomberg Philanthropies, one of the funding groups that pledged to finance high seas protection at COP16.

The ocean is a powerful climate regulator. Scientists estimate the ocean absorbs around 25 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions and 90 percent of the excess heat generated by these emissions. 

The High Seas Treaty

By ratifying the high seas treaty, participating countries agree to protect high sea biodiversity across all activities they are engaged in with other international governing bodies including the regional fisheries management organizations; the International Maritime Organization, which oversees commercial shipping; and the International Seabed Authority, which manages seabed use and extraction. 

“If they’ve ratified the treaty, when they go to the regional fisheries management organizations, they can’t then approve overfishing or destroying ancient coral reefs on sea mountains or seabed mining without some form of extensive impact assessments,” said Hubbard. 

These environmental impact assessments are a key part of the treaty that include processes for evaluating and mitigating the potential effect of any planned human activities on biodiversity. 

Additionally, countries supporting the treaty commit to equitably sharing information about marine genetic resources they find in the high seas, as well as a portion of financial benefits they receive as a result. Many cosmetic, pharmaceutical and industrial products are made from marine life found in the unique ocean ecosystems in the high seas, including the raw materials in some Covid 19 tests, said Hubbard. 

These funds will be used to help ensure developing countries can equitably participate in high seas protection activities, including establishing new networks of marine protected areas in biodiversity hotspots. 

First Generation of High Seas MPAS

New marine protected areas proposed by countries will undergo rigorous review by a BBNJ scientific decision-making body established by the treaty. Once they are approved by the scientific body, treaty members will vote to decide whether or not to move forward in establishing the protected area. All parties involved will collaborate with the scientific committee to continue to monitor the protected area to make sure it is achieving its specific conservation goals. 

Already, stretches of the high seas are being recommended as potential protected areas. A report from the Pew Charitable Trusts released last this year lists ten places worthy of consideration based on their ecological, biological and cultural significance. It can be hard for some people to fathom the diverse biodiversity that exists in the high seas, said Nichola Clark, one of the authors of the report, who leads the nonprofit’s BBNJ governance work. 

“They think of the high seas as just like watery deserts, deep blue nothingness,” said Clark. “One of the reasons for doing the report and highlighting a couple of the sites was to just dispel that myth.” 

The Sargasso Sea and Corner Rise Seamounts in the central to western Atlantic, for example, are renowned for their floating forests of sargassum seaweeds that serve as protection, food, spawning and nursery habitat for nearly 300 species of fish, 25 birds and 100 invertebrates.

Other suggested areas in the report include the Arabian Sea, located in the northern Indian Ocean, where deep-sea creatures have adapted to living in low oxygen conditions and larger predators like squids and tuna thrive. The Lord Howe Rise and South Tasman Sea, which serves as an important breeding and feeding ground for humpback whales, is also listed.

“They think of the high seas as just like watery deserts, deep blue nothingness. One of the reasons for doing the report and highlighting a couple of the sites was to just dispel that myth.”

— Nichola Clark, the Pew Charitable Trusts

Pakarati, who serves as an ocean council member for the Indigenous Rapa Nui, is calling for the protection of another listed area, the Salas y Gómez and Nazca Ridges. These connected deep-sea volcanic mountain ranges extend for nearly 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile to Rapa Nui in the Central Pacific. The area includes more than a 100 underwater mountains called seamounts, which provide important habitat for blue whales and leatherback sea turtles and more than 80 other threatened or endangered species. Earlier this year, a team of oceanographers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute identified deep sea coral reefs in the area and 20 possible new species across 10 of these seamounts. Currently, more than 70 percent of these underwater ridges extend into areas beyond national jurisdiction, leaving them prone to increasing threats.

According to the High Seas Alliance, deep-sea trawling—a fishing method that drags weighted nets along the seafloor—is taking a toll on biodiversity in the area. Deep sea corals and other seabed habitats have been destroyed. Lost fishing gear and plastic debris threaten to entangle fish and marine mammals. In the future, Pakarati said he worries deep sea mining may pose further threats. The seabed in the area is rich in minerals like cobalt. 

“We believe that by protecting that mountain range, we will be able to ensure the maintenance of the marine resources that we have,” said Pakarati. But, he added, “Let’s start, not with one area, but with an area in each ocean and in each hemisphere.”