In the spring of 2010, I was one of a few journalists invited to travel down to the coast of Ecuador to join an ocean-going TED conference. With me aboard a National Geographic science vessel were ocean and climate scientists, underwater photographers, marine activists, environmental group CEOs, a lot of green-minded rich people, and famous actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Edward Norton.
I promise that what follows is not just a chance to tell one of the few close brushes with celebrity in my journalistic career.
For several days, we toured the pristine Galapagos Islands and listened to presentations from the experts and artists on board. That’s how I ended up snorkeling in the Pacific with DiCaprio, and, one night, playing the party game Werewolf with the Hollywood contingent. (The details are fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure Norton eliminated me right away. The lesson here is don’t play a game that depends on acting ability with Academy Award-nominated actors.)
We were all there because of the work of Sylvia Earle, a legendary oceanographer and advocate for marine conservation. Earle was launching Mission Blue, an organization dedicated to creating a global network of marine protected areas (MPAs), including the largely unprotected high seas or international waters. As Earle put it in a 2009 speech, “The high seas — the areas beyond national jurisdiction — cover nearly half of the world, but they’re a kind of ‘no-man’s-land’ where anything goes.” Less than 1 percent of the high seas are classified as highly protected.
But now, thanks to a rare piece of environmental good news, the high seas are finally getting some protection. On January 17, the UN’s long-gestating international High Seas Treaty entered into force, meaning it became binding international law for the countries and parties that have ratified it.
It’s not a complete fulfillment of what ocean advocates like Earle have long called for. But it is a new rulebook — and, more importantly, a new set of institutions — for the largest shared space on the planet.
A treaty built for the parts of the ocean no one “owns”
For decades, the high seas have been partially governed at best by a patchwork of overlapping authorities. Shipping is largely handled through the International Maritime Organization. Fisheries are overseen by regional fisheries management organizations. The deep seabed is handled through the International Seabed Authority. Those bodies matter. The problem is that none of them, on their own, were designed to deliver broad, coordinated biodiversity protection across the open ocean — especially as new threats like climate change grew and technology made it easier to operate farther from shore.
The oceans and their wildlife need that protection. Take overfishing. Across 1,320 populations of 483 species of commercial fish, 82 percent are being removed faster than they can repopulate. Even when fishery management organizations aren’t captured by commercial interest, they’re too narrowly focused on specific territories or species. No one is looking out for the oceans as a whole.
The High Seas Treaty is an attempt to fix that governance gap, to make “beyond national jurisdiction” stop meaning “beyond meaningful stewardship.” The treaty, which emerged from nearly two decades of UN negotiations to close gaps in the existing Law of the Sea, has a sweeping official objective — conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction — but its architecture is practical, focusing on a handful of major points, plus the governing bodies that can turn those principles into real decisions.
And while not every country is fully on board — the US signed the treaty but never ratified it — 145 nations have, which means there’s a substantial coalition committing to a new way of governing the global ocean commons.
The oceans as a truly shared resource
Here’s what the treaty will not do: It will not instantly create a vast ocean park next week, nor will it magically end illegal fishing or reverse warming seas.
What it will do is create the legal and institutional machinery that makes protection possible — and makes “doing harm” harder to hide.
The headline provision is the one conservationists have been chasing for years: a global process to establish area‑based management tools, including marine protected areas, in the high seas.
That matters because MPAs can work when designed and enforced well, but global ocean biodiversity goals can’t be met unless they’re extended to the two-thirds of the oceans that make up the high seas. And importantly, the treaty aims for an ecologically representative network of MPAs — areas that map to the needs of the ocean, rather than just random spots on the globe.
The treaty also insists that activities that may significantly harm the marine environment, like industrial fishing, should be assessed in advance, monitored afterward, and disclosed publicly. The agreement envisions such environmental impact assessment reports being shared through a “clearing‑house” mechanism — essentially, a transparency infrastructure — that allows scientific review and recommendations if monitoring suggests harms from those activities that weren’t predicted. That’s the right approach for what is the ultimate shared resource.
If the high seas are the planet’s largest commons, they’re also a library of genetic information with real commercial potential: pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, biotech. So far, that’s been a problem. If commercially valuable discoveries come from a global commons, who benefits?
The agreement sets expectations for fair and equitable benefit‑sharing, including open access to scientific data, along with transparency about collection and use, though it anticipates key details (especially around who gets the money) will be hammered out through the new treaty bodies. Ultimately, monetary benefits will go to a shared pool for helping developing countries build marine science programs and for the creation and management of more MPAs.
The treaty also aims to balance out one of the reasons that high-seas governance has been so unbalanced towards rich nations: the high cost of both ocean science and enforcement. (That’s one reason why waters near impoverished African countries are being exploited by illegal fishing fleets from China and Europe.) Capacity‑building and technology sharing is a core element of the treaty, intended to help developing countries participate in decision‑making and implementation that directly affects them.
We can create global solutions
Like anything hammered out through the UN, the treaty is far from perfect. The absence of the US is important, if unsurprising: The Senate has failed to ratify numerous international treaties in recent decades, especially environmental ones. The treaty has enough ratifications to enter into force anyway, but US participation would have made it easier to enforce, provided more scientific capacity to implement it, and added political legitimacy.
And the high seas will still be hard to police. The treaty will need political will and generous funding to be effective. And its agents will have to coordinate with existing bodies that govern fishing, mining, and shipping, which is sure to create friction.
But amid relentless environmental bad news, it’s worth noticing when the international system does something concrete: creating binding rules, building institutions, and giving itself a chance to protect the parts of the planet that belong to everyone — and that, until now, have too often been treated as belonging to whoever gets there first.
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