More than 190 countries have approved a landmark agreement to protect marine life across the roughly two-thirds of the ocean that lies beyond any nation’s borders. The UN High Seas Treaty establishes a framework for creating new marine protected areas in international waters — a vast expanse that has, until now, been largely beyond the reach of coordinated environmental law.
At a glance
- High Seas Treaty: More than 190 UN member states approved the agreement, which aims to protect international waters from threats including shipping, overfishing, pollution, and deep-sea mining.
- Marine protected areas: Just 1.2 percent of international waters are currently protected — the treaty creates a legal pathway to change that, supporting a global goal to protect 30 percent of land and sea.
- Treaty ratification: The agreement must be formally adopted at a future UN session and ratified by at least 60 countries before it enters into force, a process that could take several years.
Why the high seas matter
International waters cover roughly half of Earth’s surface. They are home to enormous biodiversity — from deep-sea ecosystems that scientists are only beginning to understand, to the migratory routes of whales, tuna, and seabirds that cross entire ocean basins.
Yet these waters have existed in a legal gap. Coastal nations regulate their own exclusive economic zones, but the high seas have lacked a binding framework for environmental protection. Rebecca Helm, a marine biologist at Georgetown University, put it plainly: “We only really have two major global commons — the atmosphere and the oceans.” Protecting the ocean, she told the Associated Press, “is absolutely critical to the health of our planet.”
That gap is what the High Seas Treaty is designed to close. Bruno Oberle, director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the treaty “opens the path for humankind to finally provide protection to marine life across vast swathes of the ocean” and will “close a significant gap in international law.”
What the treaty does
The agreement does more than designate protected zones. It builds a working infrastructure for international ocean governance — including provisions for sharing scientific findings, transferring environmental technology to lower-income nations, and coordinating research into threats like pollution and climate-driven habitat loss.
The treaty also directly supports the 30×30 commitment, a goal established at the UN biodiversity conference in December 2022 C.E. to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and sea by 2030 C.E. With only 1.2 percent of international waters currently under any form of protection, the distance to that goal is significant — but the treaty now provides the legal tools to start covering it.
A long road to agreement
The deal came after years of stalled negotiations. Multiple rounds of talks at the United Nations produced false starts before delegations finally converged on a text that more than 190 countries could endorse. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the outcome “a victory for multilateralism and for global efforts to counter the destructive trends facing ocean health, now and for generations to come.”
The breadth of that agreement — spanning wealthy and developing nations, maritime powers and landlocked states — reflects how widely the stakes are understood. The UN’s BBNJ process (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction) that produced the treaty took nearly two decades from its earliest discussions to a final text.
The work still ahead
Approval is not the same as protection. The treaty still requires formal adoption at a future UN General Assembly session, followed by ratification from at least 60 countries — a process that could stretch across several years. History offers cautionary examples of international agreements that were signed but never fully implemented.
Enforcement in international waters is also inherently difficult. The high seas have no coast guard, and monitoring vast stretches of open ocean requires satellite technology, international coordination, and sustained funding. Conservationists will need to watch whether the protected areas created under the treaty are actually enforced, and whether the technology-sharing provisions translate into real capacity for nations that lack oceanographic infrastructure.
Still, the treaty represents the most significant step in international ocean law in decades. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which governs ocean use more broadly, entered into force in 1994 C.E. — and the high seas have waited thirty years for a companion agreement specifically designed to protect the life within them. That agreement now exists.
The ocean absorbs roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide humans emit each year and produces more than half of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Keeping it healthy is not a regional concern — it is a planetary one. And for the first time, the international community has a legal framework designed to do exactly that across the full expanse of the global ocean.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Yale Environment 360
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- Ghana establishes a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on marine conservation
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