Sixty ratifications. That was the bar, and Morocco supplied the 60th on Friday, which means the High Seas Treaty takes effect from January.
The agreement has been two decades in the making. Once in force it opens the way for stretches of international waters to be placed inside marine protected areas.
The need is plain enough. Years of overfishing, shipping pollution and warming seas have hurt life below the surface, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature found nearly 10% of marine species at risk of extinction in its latest assessment. Three years ago countries agreed that 30% of the world’s national and international waters must be protected by 2030. Right now just 1% of the high seas has that protection.
The difficulty is that nobody owns these waters. No single country controls them, and every nation has a right to ship and fish there.
Praise from campaigners
Environmental groups did not hold back. Kirsten Schuijt, director-general of the World Wide Fund for Nature, called it “a monumental achievement for ocean conservation”. She said the treaty “will be a positive catalyst for collaboration across international waters” and “a turning point for two-thirds of the world’s ocean that lie beyond national jurisdiction.”
Mads Christensen, executive director of Greenpeace International, went with “a landmark moment” and “proof that countries can come together to protect our blue planet”. His closing line was blunter: “The era of exploitation and destruction must end. Our oceans can’t wait and neither can we.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed to the scope. “Covering more than two-thirds of the ocean, the agreement sets binding rules to conserve and sustainably use marine biodiversity,” he said.
A quick ratification, by treaty standards
Many governments need parliamentary approval before they can ratify, and that can take longer than five years. Elizabeth Wilson, senior director for environmental policy at The Pew Charitable Trusts, told the BBC at the UN Oceans Conference earlier this year that the pace here was “record time”. The UK introduced its own ratification bill to Parliament earlier this month.
Critics have one complaint about the design. Countries will run their own environmental impact assessments and take the final decision on them, though other states can register concerns with monitoring bodies.
The stakes reach well beyond fish. The ocean is estimated to add $2.5tn (£1.9tn) to world economies, and it supplies up to 80% of the oxygen people breathe.
