Nations Agree on a Treaty to Protect the High Seas

On March 4, 2023, delegates at United Nations headquarters in New York reached consensus on a legal framework to protect marine life in international waters. Officially known as the agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, the text concluded almost two decades of discussions, including preparatory work that began in 2004 and formal diplomatic negotiations initiated by the General Assembly in 2017. Rena Lee, the president of the intergovernmental conference, announced the consensus at the end of an extended negotiating session. The United Nations adopted the finished agreement on June 19, 2023, establishing the first comprehensive treaty dedicated to conserving biodiversity across the two-thirds of the ocean that lie outside national borders.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982, coastal states exercise jurisdiction over exclusive economic zones extending 200 nautical miles from their shores. Outside those zones, the high seas and the international seabed lacked a unified environmental regime. Governance depended on disparate sectoral bodies, such as regional fisheries management organizations, which held narrow mandates and left broad expanses of the global ocean without coordinated protection. Growing pressures from shipping, deep-sea mining, plastic debris, overfishing, and climate shifts revealed significant gaps in this fragmented structure, prompting member states to negotiate a binding pact to operate under the overarching convention.