Ocean Governance and the High Seas: What Each Position Is Protecting

In June 2023, after nearly two decades of negotiations, United Nations member states agreed on the text of the Treaty on the High Seas — formally, the Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, known as the BBNJ Agreement. After reaching the 60-ratification threshold on September 19, 2025, the treaty entered into force on January 17, 2026. It addresses the governance of the high seas: the 64 percent of the ocean's surface that lies beyond any country's exclusive economic zone, and the seabed and water column beneath it. No binding framework had previously governed biodiversity protection in these waters. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea — the "constitution for the oceans" — established exclusive economic zones extending 200 nautical miles from coastlines, gave coastal states rights over continental shelf resources, and created the International Seabed Authority to govern mineral extraction from the deep seabed. What it left ungoverned was the question of biodiversity: the living organisms in international waters, the genetic resources contained in deep-sea species found nowhere else on earth, and the ecosystems that provide oxygen, regulate carbon, and sustain the marine food web on which hundreds of millions of people depend.

The BBNJ treaty fills that gap — in principle. It establishes a framework for marine protected areas on the high seas, a mechanism for sharing benefits from marine genetic resources, and requirements for environmental impact assessments for activities in international waters. It is the most significant ocean governance instrument since UNCLOS itself. It is also a framework without enforcement: the treaty sets up institutions and processes but leaves jurisdiction, compliance mechanisms, and the most consequential decisions about what activities are permitted where to be negotiated in the years ahead. The treaty's adoption was celebrated by conservation organizations as a breakthrough. It was received more cautiously by states whose ocean-related economic interests — deep-sea mining, distant-water fishing, access to genetic resources — the treaty might constrain. What is contested is not the ocean's importance. It is who governs it, for whose benefit, toward what end.

What marine conservation and biodiversity advocates are protecting

The global ocean commons — and the recognition that the high seas are not an empty frontier but the largest and least-governed ecosystem on earth, being degraded by extractive uses faster than any governance framework has been able to track. Marine biologist Sylvia Earle, who has spent her career documenting the state of the global ocean, argues that the high seas debate takes place against a backdrop that is already dire: ocean temperatures have risen sharply, industrial fishing has depleted 90 percent of large predatory fish populations in the past century, plastic pollution reaches the deepest ocean trenches, and deep-sea ecosystems — hydrothermal vents, seamounts, cold-water coral gardens — are being proposed for extraction before they have been adequately described or mapped. The BBNJ treaty, in conservation advocates' framing, represents the minimum governance framework necessary to avoid foreclosing biodiversity that has not yet been inventoried. Conservation advocates are protecting the recognition that the ocean is not a renewable resource operating on human timescales: deep-sea coral ecosystems take centuries to centuries to recover from trawling damage; seamount communities disturbed by mining equipment may not recover at all on timescales relevant to human governance. The precautionary principle — that the burden of proof should lie with those proposing extraction, not with those advocating protection — is not a policy preference in this framing; it is the logical implication of governing a system whose recovery timescales outlast human political institutions.

The 30x30 goal — and the argument that protecting 30 percent of the ocean by 2030 requires governance tools that only the BBNJ framework can provide. The 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework committed signatory nations to protecting at least 30 percent of the world's land and ocean by 2030. Currently, approximately 8 percent of the ocean has any form of protected status, and much of that protection is nominal — areas designated as protected but lacking enforcement or management. Reaching 30 percent requires protecting areas of the high seas, which cover 64 percent of the ocean's surface but have no mechanism for area-based management outside the BBNJ framework. Conservation advocates are protecting the legal and institutional architecture that makes 30x30 achievable rather than aspirational — the conference of parties established by BBNJ, the process for proposing and evaluating marine protected areas, and the environmental impact assessment requirements that would apply to deep-sea mining and other industrial activities before they begin. Without these mechanisms, 30x30 is a numerical target with no pathway to implementation in international waters.

The economic value of ecosystem services — and the argument that marine genetic resources in particular represent a heritage whose commercial exploitation, without benefit-sharing, is a form of appropriation by wealthy nations from global commons. Deep-sea organisms — the bacteria around hydrothermal vents, the unique enzymes in cold-water sponges, the compounds produced by organisms living in pressure and darkness far beyond the reach of conventional biology — have yielded commercially valuable discoveries. The heat-stable DNA polymerase derived from Thermus aquaticus, discovered in Yellowstone but related to hydrothermal vent organisms, became the basis of the PCR reaction that underlies modern molecular biology and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in commercial value. The anti-cancer compound ET-743 (trabectedin) was derived from a marine tunicate. Marine genetic resource bioprospecting is a growing industry. The question the BBNJ treaty addresses is whether the commercial benefits from organisms found in international waters — which are, by definition, not within the jurisdiction of any single nation — should accrue primarily to the pharmaceutical or biotech companies whose researchers collected the samples, or whether some portion of that benefit should flow to a global fund available to all nations. Conservation advocates are protecting the principle that the common heritage of the high seas means equitable sharing of its benefits, not unlimited extraction for those with the technical capacity to access it.

What deep-sea mining interests and development-nation resource advocates are protecting

The right to access the mineral wealth of the deep seabed as a development pathway — and the interpretation of "common heritage of mankind" as meaning equitable resource access, not conservation-by-exclusion. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a 4.5-million-square-kilometer area of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico, contains vast deposits of polymetallic nodules — fist-sized accretions of manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper that have accumulated over millions of years on the abyssal seafloor. These nodules contain minerals critical to electric vehicle batteries and energy storage — the same minerals that the green energy transition requires in dramatically larger volumes. Several Pacific island nations, including Nauru, Tonga, and Kiribati, have sponsored commercial entities to pursue deep-sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, viewing the royalties and development rights as economic opportunities for countries with few conventional revenue sources. Development advocates are protecting the original intent of UNCLOS Part XI, which established the International Seabed Authority precisely to ensure that seabed mineral wealth would benefit all countries — including and especially developing nations — rather than being monopolized by technologically advanced states. A moratorium on deep-sea mining, in this framing, is not a conservation measure. It is a mechanism that preserves access to critical minerals for the corporations and countries that can extract them from land-based mines, while preventing developing nations from accessing comparable resource wealth from the seabed.

The clean energy transition as a governance constraint — and the argument that a moratorium on deep-sea mining would extend dependence on land-based mining with worse environmental and human rights records. The International Energy Agency projects that demand for cobalt, nickel, and manganese will increase by factors of 3 to 21 by 2040 under clean energy transition scenarios. Current land-based cobalt production is concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where mining has been extensively documented to involve child labor, community displacement, and toxic pollution. Nickel mining in Indonesia and the Philippines has generated significant rainforest destruction. Deep-sea mining proponents argue that nodule extraction on the abyssal plain, far from human communities and in an ecosystem already characterized by low biodiversity and slow change, may produce fewer social and environmental harms than the land-based alternative. The International Seabed Authority's sponsoring state framework, they argue, provides a mechanism for distributing the economic benefits of critical mineral extraction to developing nations while potentially avoiding the worst documented harms of land-based mining — if the regulatory framework is designed well enough. Deep-sea mining interests are protecting the recognition that the choice is not between deep-sea mining and clean oceans; it is between governed deep-sea mining with benefit-sharing and continued expansion of land-based extraction with established and documented harm.

What fishing industry and flag state sovereignty advocates are protecting

The freedom of the high seas — and the navigational, operational, and economic freedoms that UNCLOS established and that global commerce and the global fishing industry depend on. The freedom of the high seas — freedom of navigation, freedom of overflight, freedom of fishing, freedom of scientific research — is a principle of international law with roots in the seventeenth-century Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius, whose Mare Liberum (1609) argued that the sea was a commons that no state could claim. That principle is embodied in UNCLOS and governs the logistics of global commerce: container shipping routes, submarine cables, fisheries, and naval operations all depend on the high seas remaining freely accessible to vessels of all nations. Distant-water fishing fleets — operated by China, Spain, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and others — account for the majority of fishing effort on the high seas, and their operators and sponsoring governments have consistently resisted governance frameworks that would require environmental impact assessments, area-based restrictions, or new permit requirements for fishing in international waters. Sovereignty advocates are protecting the principle that states retain the right to fish in international waters under their own flags without subjecting their vessels to review and potential veto by a multilateral body whose composition and decision-making rules reflect the interests of states that may have no distant-water fishing capacity.

The risk that environmental impact assessment requirements and marine protected area designations will become tools for maritime powers to exclude competitors under a conservation rationale. The history of international conservation agreements includes genuine conservation and also the use of conservation language to protect economic interests. High Seas Alliance organizations are predominantly based in wealthy, conservation-oriented democracies. Distant-water fishing industries are often the primary ocean-related economic sector for states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America whose vessels would be subject to new governance requirements. Sovereignty advocates are protecting the recognition that a new multilateral governance body — its procedures, funding, and institutional culture shaped largely by the same wealthy states that have the resources to participate in extended UN negotiations — has structural potential to impose costs on economic actors from developing nations while exempting or accommodating the interests of wealthier ones. Whether BBNJ's benefit-sharing provisions for marine genetic resources represent genuine equity or elaborate formality depends on details of implementation that are still being negotiated. The concern that conservation governance can be captured by powerful actors for exclusionary purposes is not paranoia. It is a documented pattern in the history of international environmental agreements.

What small island developing states and climate-ocean justice advocates are protecting

The ocean health on which their physical survival depends — and the recognition that climate change is degrading that health faster than any governance framework can compensate for without binding emissions commitments. For Pacific Island nations, the ocean is not primarily a governance debate. It is the condition of existence. The Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and their neighbors occupy low-lying atolls formed from coral reef systems that are dying as ocean temperatures rise. The Great Barrier Reef experienced its fourth mass bleaching event in 2022; Pacific coral reef systems have lost 50 percent of their coverage since the 1950s. The Pacific island states that have sponsored deep-sea mining licenses represent one response — accessing revenue from the ocean while terrestrial survival remains uncertain. But a different set of Pacific island voices — represented in negotiations by the Marshall Islands, which has been among the most insistent on climate ambition in international forums — argues that the BBNJ treaty, however valuable, addresses the wrong problem if the ocean is simultaneously being acidified and heated by carbon emissions that the treaty does not touch. Ocean acidification, driven by CO₂ absorption, has lowered the pH of surface seawater by 0.1 units since the industrial era — equivalent to a 26 percent increase in hydrogen ion concentration — and is on track to dissolve the calcium carbonate structures that coral reefs and shell-forming species require. Small island advocates are protecting the recognition that ocean governance without climate governance is a frame that allows the world to attend to the procedural question of who manages ocean resources while the substantive question of whether those resources will survive the century remains unanswered.

The interests of communities whose livelihoods and food security depend on near-shore fisheries that are being depleted by distant-water industrial fleets operating under flags of convenience — and the argument that BBNJ's ocean protection is incomplete without addressing the labor and equity dimensions of who actually fishes the sea. Industrial distant-water fishing vessels — often flagged to states with minimal labor regulation for the labor cost advantages, operating in international waters beyond the reach of port state or flag state enforcement — represent the primary source of high seas fishing pressure. Investigations by The Guardian, the International Labour Organization, and the Environmental Justice Foundation have documented widespread labor abuses aboard distant-water vessels: crew members, often recruited from Southeast Asia and Africa, working under conditions that include forced labor, debt bondage, physical violence, and the denial of the right to disembark. Small island and coastal developing state advocates are protecting the recognition that the governance of the high seas is not only a conservation problem. It is a labor problem, a food security problem, and a justice problem: the communities most dependent on healthy near-shore fisheries are downstream of fishing pressure exerted by industrial fleets operating on the high seas under minimal accountability to anyone.

What the argument is actually about

The ocean governance debate is, at its foundation, a debate about who governs the global commons, for whose benefit — and whether "common heritage of mankind" means equitable resource access, equitable conservation, or something that cannot be reduced to either frame without losing something essential. The phrase "common heritage of mankind" entered the UNCLOS negotiations through a 1967 speech by Maltese diplomat Arvid Pardo, who proposed that the deep seabed and its mineral resources should belong not to any nation but to humanity as a whole, with benefits shared equitably across all nations and especially developing ones. The principle became the legal foundation of the International Seabed Authority. But it contains a productive ambiguity: does "common heritage" mean that the resources belong to everyone and should be extracted for shared benefit? Or that they belong to no one and should be protected from extraction that diminishes what future generations will inherit? Deep-sea mining interests and conservation advocates have drawn opposite conclusions from the same principle, and both are operating within the principle's genuine scope of meaning.

The International Seabed Authority as a test case for whether multilateral institutions can govern extraction in the absence of strong state accountability — and the structural tension between the ISA's mandate to promote mining and its mandate to protect the environment. The ISA has issued over 30 exploratory contracts for mineral resources in the deep seabed. Its Legal and Technical Commission — the body responsible for reviewing mining plans and environmental standards — has been criticized by environmental groups and several member states for opacity, for lacking independent scientific oversight, and for a built-in structural conflict of interest: the ISA receives royalties from the contracts it governs, which creates institutional incentives that may not align with precautionary environmental governance. In 2021, Nauru triggered an obscure UNCLOS provision — the "two-year rule" — requiring the ISA to finalize mining regulations within two years or be forced to process applications under incomplete rules. The resulting pressure exposed a fault line between states that wanted precautionary delay and states that wanted commercial access to proceed. The BBNJ treaty's environmental impact assessment requirements are intended to apply to activities including deep-sea mining — but the relationship between BBNJ governance bodies and the ISA is still being negotiated. Whether the new framework strengthens environmental oversight of the existing one or creates parallel procedures that can be used to bypass each other depends on implementation choices not yet made.

The asymmetry between what is already known and what would be lost — and the recognition that the governance decisions being made now will determine what future generations inherit from a deep ocean that remains largely unmapped. Scientists estimate that less than 25 percent of the deep ocean has been mapped to the resolution available for the moon's surface. New species are routinely discovered at hydrothermal vents, seamounts, and in the water column; in 2020, a single deep-sea expedition in the Indian Ocean identified dozens of potentially new species. The organisms in these environments have been evolving in isolation, at depth, under pressure and darkness, for timescales that dwarf human civilization; the biochemical novelty they contain is, in a literal sense, irreplaceable. The governance decisions made in the next decade — about whether deep-sea mining proceeds before baseline surveys are complete, about which high seas areas receive area-based protection and which remain open to exploitation, about what level of evidence triggers the precautionary principle — will determine what survives for the scientific, medical, ecological, and aesthetic inheritance of future generations. What is unusual about the ocean governance debate, compared to most governance debates in this collection, is that the entities most directly affected — the organisms that are the subject of conservation and extraction — cannot participate in the discussion. Their interests must be represented entirely by human proxies, whose own interests are partially aligned with theirs and partially not. This is not different in structure from the representation problem in long-term governance generally. But the ocean makes it unusually legible.

The high seas debate is ultimately a debate about the obligation of living generations to what they do not fully understand and cannot fully recover once they have damaged it. The BBNJ treaty is the first serious attempt to govern 64 percent of the planet's surface — an attempt made necessary by the fact that the alternative is governance by default: extraction proceeds wherever it can, at whatever rate markets permit, until the question of what remains is answered by the absence of what was there. What is being protected by each position in this debate — the right to access shared resources, the right of communities to benefit from common wealth, the integrity of ecosystems evolved over geological time, the survival of island nations whose ocean is their home — are all real. The challenge of ocean governance is not to choose between them but to design institutions capable of holding all of them simultaneously, across the full length of time that the ocean will matter.