The Ship Has Reached the Shore: The High Seas Treaty Explained

0:00 There's a video online of a room full of pretty much exhausted diplomats breaking into applause after nearly 20 years of work. One woman is shown bringing down the gavel and says, " The ship has reached the shore." And that moment ended a treaty negotiation that had already failed once in public two years ago, or I even think a year ago, like before that. And it just became binding international law this year, and the fight over what it actually protects is happening exactly right now. This is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your information for everything that has to do with ocean, whether it's news, science, conservation, stories that I like to tell about what's been happening.

0:46 This is a story that we're gonna talk about today about the High Seas Treaty, or what's known as the Borders Beyond National Jurisdiction, so the BBNJ. We're gonna talk about the history of it. We're gonna talk about why it took so long to put together and what is actually involved, and how it's gonna make the world a better place if everything works out the way it does. Or again, if you listened to yesterday's episode when we talk about public policy and we talk about how putting something in place right now is better than not putting in place at all, and building on the baseline and building up to get more protections later on. Having public policy in place now is better than not having anything at all.

1:29 Remember that when people come to you about policy or try to critique you about policy not being perfect. It's never perfect, it never will be perfect, but we can get to near, damn near close, and I think it's important to do that. All right, so let's just go through, like, the history. So, 2004, the idea first surfaces at the UN Oceans Working Session. So it's like, "Hey, we need to protect the high seas," which is everything beyond the national jurisdiction. So the exclusive economic zone stretches out 200 nautical miles from shore for every country, and so anything within that EEZ, that country protects. So Canada has a 200 nautical mile limit all around, it's the longest coastline in the world, and it protects everything in there. It's responsible for everything in there, so it can do pretty much whatever it wants or anything in those exclusive economic zones.

2:11 Same with every, any other country, right? Sovereign country. Now, so at this point, anything beyond those borders though is pretty much open to anybody. Nobody has jurisdiction. People can fish outside of Canada's borders, the Exclusive economic zone, Argentina, wherever that is, wherever those fish are, they can actually go. So, like, when the cod stock was huge, you know, we were getting a lot of Portuguese and Spanish fishing fleets that were coming over and sitting on, on that border, sometimes crossing it, which was a big no-no, and fishing the cod. But we were already having problems with cod, and so we didn't wanna have that problem be caused by somebody else or helped caused by somebody else. So we wanted to protect our borders, and so we had to send out Coast Guard ships and even Navy ships at some point, to scare them off. So anything beyond those borders, the national jurisdiction, it's pretty much Wild West.

2:54 You can pretty much do whatever you want. So the idea in 2004 first surfaced at the UN Oceans working session, and from 2006 to 2015, there was, like, an ad hoc open-ended informal working group that meets, like, nine separate times just to study whether a treaty was even needed. Like, think about that. You're spending almost 10 years, right, nine years going after, like, "Hey, do we actually need this or not?" So in 2015, the working group finally recommends to the UN, " We actually need this draft," right? "We have to have draft one. Like, let's go for draft one." And so 2016 to 2017, there's a preparatory committee holds four sessions to rough out what the treaty should contain. And then 2018 to 2023, a formal intergovernmental conference holds five negotiating sessions to write the actual legal text.

3:41 "We should probably think about this," to a finished treaty, which is, a good concrete answer to why does international policy move so slowly, is because you're dealing with so many countries. You're dealing with the world, all the countries, and they have to agree. And it took two decades to just be like, "Hey, we should probably think about this. We should probably do this," and then have those discussions start. So it takes a long time to negotiate these types of treaties. Now, what are they actually fighting over? And it comes down to really four pillars, that's in the BBNJ or the High Seas Treaty. I'll refer to it as the High Seas Treaty right now. So the first pillar, who gets to profit from marine genetic resources discovered in international waters? So deep sea organisms used in medicine or biotech.

4:24 If, say, Canada or the US goes into the Philippines and catches these animals and we're like, "Oh, actually, you know what? We studied them, and they can cure cancer." Well, that's great. Well, the pharmaceutical companies make all the money, like in Canada and the US, but then what about the Philippines? Those animals were found there. You went into the waters near there. They should have a cut of that profit as well because they just didn't have the ability to go get it, cause they don't have the money to do so. So it's like how those benefits get shared with countries that can't afford deep sea research fleets of their own, right? It's an important part of that equity that we see around the world that needs to happen around the world. Same thing with climate change, right? When we have these carbon credits where you can trade carbon credits, but also some countries pay more for the consequences of climate change compared to others who don't have the technology to be able to protect themselves, right?

5:10 Now, the other pillar was how to actually create marine protected areas in international waters where there's no single country that has jurisdiction to declare one. So who's in charge of that? So if a marine protected area gets put off the coast of Argentina, the exclusive economic zone, just off of that, where the squid come out and it's a big fishery, and then you have this distant water fleet that sits there. But if they want that to be protected, who's gonna manage that? It's gonna be Argentina probably, but who else? Their neighbors? Is it gonna be some African countries that come over? Is it gonna be China, who has the largest distant fleet? There's gonna be a lot of people who want access to that, and wanna make sure that these marine protected areas work, but also who manages it? Is it every country? That's gonna be impossible to get anything done anytime soon. So that kind of goes through that process.

5:51 The third pillar is requiring environmental impact assessments before new high seas activities go forward. Now, this is an important one 'cause we talked last week a lot about deep sea mining. So imagine if the US, no matter what, wants to go and do something in the international waters as it's trying to do in other places, they would have to do an impact assessment. The companies would have to do an impact assessment. Who holds them responsible if they're not on the UNCLOS, the UN Convention of Law of the Sea. It gets a little complicated, but that's what the idea is. If anybody tries to do deep sea mining in the international waters, in the high seas, they would have to do an impact assessment be- before going forward to show that they're not gonna do any damage or minimal damage. So we'll see how that goes. That's the third pillar. The fourth pillar, capacity building and technology transfer, so poorer coastal nations aren't locked out of enforcing or benefiting from any of this.

6:37 Now, this is, again, it's an equity thing, is to make sure that the countries that are near or dear to these animals that get caught or any activities that happen, they have the ability to do the same thing. So it's capacity building for these countries and technology transfer to be able to help and to be able to do this type of work instead of just having to give money from developed countries to developing countries, they can actually do it themselves. So these four pillars are big things. These are huge, huge items. They're huge pillars that if you look at it right off the bat, if you look at the High Seas Treaty, you're like, "Oh, there's a lot of loopholes in here." And again, step-by-step approach. This is the first version of the High Seas Treaty. And at this point, we have about 88 to 89 countries that have ratified this.

7:21 So we had 60 that ratified it in September of 2025 that allowed this treaty to go into effect in January 17th, 2026. And then that was when we had 60, and then since then we've had at least 28 more, maybe even 29. It changes every day. So that's kinda cool. Now, this policy did not come into play easily. It was supposed to be done in like August 2022. And it almost didn't. It almost just kinda fell apart. So in August 2022, the fifth negotiating session, IGC5, ended without a deal. So negotiators got close, real progress was made on all of the four pillars, but they ran out of time and couldn't close the gap. So there's a time to these negotiations, and especially the marine genetic resources and how to fund implementation.

8:06 So like think about it, you're almost there. You're against the clock, and you're in this room, windowless room, and there are people outside like running up and down the halls, like pacing, waiting for an answer. They're so close to the first High Seas Treaty, yet that doesn't happen. Imagine like how people would feel after that session, the ones that were negotiating, trying to get there, trying to get countries to agree to something, compromise, just to agree to something that is effective. You can't just say, "Oh, well yeah, this country's gonna be able to do it, but the other country can't," especially with the sharing of marine genetic resources, and how to fund that implementation. It has to come a compromise that everybody agrees on and it's equal for everybody. Nobody's gonna say, " Well, Russia can do it, but I can't.

8:47 That's gonna be okay with me." No, that doesn't happen. So the mood afterwards was like, oh, you know, it was a little defle- defeated, but it's like very carefully optimistic. They were so close. They're like, "We're gonna get it." But it was a failure even after 18 years of work, it was still a failure in 2022. And that failure is useful in really thinking about how hard it is to negotiate these types of treaties, these international treaties. It takes a long time. We're at 18 years at this point in the timeline, and nothing has been agreed on, or there's some parts, but it hasn't been fully agreed to. You create the pillars. It has to be those pillars, and that's how we're moving forward. But it wasn't until a second try after falling visibly short that the world was ready. And so, on Friday, you're gonna hear the description of the interviewee that describes the actual moment, the breakthrough, and she'll never forget it.

9:35 Tied to the High Seas Treaty finally getting agreed upon. And there's a video of that online. It's wonderful to hear. Like, the chair was Ambassador Rena Lee of Singapore, President of the UN Intergovernmental Conference of Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction. And so, like, she's the one, boom, the agreement. It hits, the gavel goes down. She becomes emotional because, it's 20 years at this point. And the agreement on the text was reached the evening of March 4th, 2023, at the UN headquarters in New York at the resumed fifth session, after a roughly 36-hour final negotiation marathon. So, think about that. You don't leave the room for 36 hours, maybe for bathroom breaks and food, but that's it.

10:15 And then when she hit that gavel, she's like, "The ship has reached the shore." Like, that line, like, she must have practiced over and over again. Like, how do you make this memorable? And I'll tell you, Rena made this so memorable. "The ship has reached the shore." And then you had, like, the sustained applause and a standing ovation from, I'm sure, a visibly exhausted room. I'll never forget the video. I remember watching it and being like, "Holy cow, this is huge. This is massive." We're, like, the kind of the middle to the end of COVID, mid to the end of COVID. Everybody's inside watching on YouTube like, "This is amazing." It made, like, worldwide news. And then the treaty was formally adopted by consensus on June 19th, 2023, so it hasn't been put into place at this point.

10:55 Everybody has to adopt it. They need a certain amount of countries to adopt it, and it's closed nearly 20 years of negotiation in different formats. And so, like, the person that I'm interviewing on Friday, her personal eyewitness account, it's not something that we could, just see, but to be in that room while everybody is looking is just amazing. Like, everybody's like, "We're done. Like, we've done this." Now it's up to the countries to ratify it. And if you think about it, like this is not a history lesson. This is live right now. This is what we're going through right now. The treaty needed 60 countries to ratify to become a binding international law. And that hit it on September 19th, 2025, when Morocco became the 60th ratifying nation.

11:36 Canada wasn't, the US wasn't, they still aren't. These are countries that I would expect to be on there, maybe not the US these days, but Canada for sure, and they haven't done it yet. Now, the High Seas Treaty formally entered into force, as I mentioned earlier, on January 17th, 2026, which is just this year. Like it's just starting. It's like a binding law. It's not just a symbolic milestone. It's a binding law. If you think about roughly two-thirds of the ocean, close to half of the planet's surface lies on international waters outside any single country's jurisdiction. Before this treaty, less than 1% of that had any form of protection. Now, the treaty is a primary legal tool for hitting the globally adopted 30 by 30 target. Now, we only have less than four years left to hit that target, protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030.

12:21 Agreed to by 196 countries in 2022. Like, this is another international agreement, so it builds on it together. Now, there's already been a meeting in March and April this year, 2026. It already happened, and it's starting to move things forward. And then the third session of the treaty's preparation committee ran on March 23rd, to April, to April 2nd, at the the UN headquarters. Over 200 delegates were present. So, since then, ratifications keep climbing. During that meeting itself in March and April, Dominican Republic and Austria both ratified while delegates were in the room, so that was huge, bringing the total to 88 parties by the close of the session on April 2nd. And that's the most recent figure that I've seen. I haven't seen anything else, but there might be 89.

13:01 It's like inconsistent in some of the other things. But if you go on the High Seas Alliance website, they have the ratification line, and it'll tell you how many it has. And as of doing this recording, there was 88. So it's kind of interesting to see how this is going. Now, there is a conference of parties, a COP1, that is set. So the preparatory commission's co-chairs recommended the first conference of the parties run January 11th to the 22nd, 2027, at UN headquarters in New York. So that's the meeting where the leftover fights actually get resolved. So everything that didn't get through or needed to be passed that couldn't get passed on the resolution they'll be going toe to toe on that for a while. Now, some of the things that did come out of that meeting in March and April, was that terms of reference for the treaty's subsidiary scientific and technical panels and an agreement to build a prototype clearing house mechanism that shared data system, basically, including protections for how indigenous traditional knowledge is handled in it.

13:53 That's ahead of the COP1. So there's still some things that are heading in that are still unresolved in COP1, is like how much money wealthier countries are obligated to put in, and how contributions are capped, and then how Article 18's area-based management tools, the actual process for designation of high seas marine protected area that'll handle individual countries' sovereignty concerns, of course. Who gets observer status at meetings and on what terms, and who hosts the treaty's secretariat, with Belgium, Chile, and China all bidding on a decision deferred to COP1. So all these things are gonna be decided in COP1, or at least discussed in COP1. We don't know if they're gonna get decided. It's kind of a cool thing to live through.

14:33 Over the last 20 years, we've seen negotiations really start with, " Hey, maybe we should do something about this. We should look into this," to, "Oh, let's, start getting something going," in the mid-2010s. And then as we get into the early 2020s, we have an agreement. Like, first it failed, then we got an agreement. This goes to show how hard it is to negotiate these types of international agreements, but it's possible. Countries could come together and do it. And it's a matter of like, hey, this first one, like if I look at this landmark treaty, It's not perfect by any means. When I first looked at it, I'm like, "Oh, there's a lot of loopholes." But it's a beginning. It's a beginning that we need. We need the countries to agree that we can do this. Now that it's agreed to and ratified, now we build.

15:14 Now the work starts. We just started getting it going. Let's see how this works. Maybe get a marine protected area in or get all that solved. There's a lot to go into. It's not just now we're gonna designate a bunch of marine protected areas. I'm sure that'll happen at times, and I'm sure there are sites that have been designated as priority sites that need to be protected. And so once it does go through, once they solve all the nuances around that, or most of them, those will be proposed, and they will be discussed, and they will be fought over by words and in these windowless rooms for 36 hours at a time. And hopefully by the end of that time, there'll be something that comes out that's binding, that is a boundary on paper and enforceable on the water. And I think that is really cool.

15:56 And to see how negotiators reacted when the gavel finally went down, that was something that, it got me emotional, and I'm not even a policy person. It's just to think about that countries around the world came together and agreed on a certain number of measures, and these pillars are pretty important that I went through, these four pillars, where they agree that this is what needs to be done in the future, and they actually got it done. And it's not perfect, but it's something to start with. So that's the episode for today. I would love to hear your thoughts on this whole process. How do you think? Do you think it should've gone faster? What do you think could help in the future? I would love to hear your thoughts. If you're on Spotify, hit me up in a comment. Love to hear from you. If you want to hit me up on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or whatever, you can do that. The links are in the show notes.

16:36 But I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Tomorrow, we're gonna be talking about seafood and seafood labels and how you as a consumer can really drive what retailers do, especially when we have the infrastructure at the top and the policies at the top, and the organization is ready to certify sustainable seafood. So we're gonna talk about that tomorrow. Don't miss it. This has been another episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.