- A new UN treaty, BBNJ, has entered into force to create the first global framework aimed explicitly at conserving biodiversity on the high seas, where industrial activity has expanded faster than oversight. The agreement matters less for its text than for whether it can be translated into real-world governance and enforcement.
- The high seas have never been lawless, but they have been managed through fragmented sector-by-sector institutions, leaving biodiversity as a secondary concern. BBNJ attempts to close that gap without replacing existing bodies, which creates both opportunity and friction.
- The treaty’s success will hinge on practical systems: transparent environmental assessments, credible monitoring, and the capacity for more countries to participate meaningfully. Technology can make harmful activity harder to hide, but it cannot substitute for political will and durable enforcement.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
For most of modern history, the open ocean has been treated as a place apart. Beyond the 200-nautical-mile limits of national jurisdiction, it was governed by custom, fragmented rules, and the assumption that what lay far offshore was too vast to manage and too resilient to exhaust. That assumption has worn thin. Fishing fleets now range farther and stay out longer. Shipping lanes have thickened into highways. Interest in seabed minerals has grown. And the tools to extract value from the deep sea, including its genetic resources, have advanced faster than the institutions meant to oversee them.
On January 17th 2026, a new United Nations agreement—the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction accord, or BBNJ—entered into force. It is the first global framework aimed explicitly at conserving life in the waters and seabed beyond national borders. It creates a process for establishing protected areas on the high seas, requires environmental impact assessments for new activities, sets out rules for sharing benefits from marine genetic resources, and commits to capacity building and technology transfer. The details will take years to settle. The shift in legal posture is immediate.
The text is done. The hard part is turning it into practice.
That is not a dramatic statement. It is simply where most treaties succeed or fail. The high seas cover roughly 60% of the ocean and more than 40% of the planet’s surface. They include deep trenches, seamount chains, and midwater ecosystems that regulate nutrient cycles and store vast amounts of carbon. Less than 1.5% of this space is protected in any formal sense. Meanwhile fishing, shipping, bioprospecting, and exploratory mining have expanded there faster than the rules governing them. If BBNJ becomes another set of promises made far from shore, it will change little. If it becomes a working system, it could reshape how the global commons is used.
The treaty arrives at a moment when the constraint in ocean conservation is no longer a lack of scientific warning. It is the weakness of enforcement and the absence of durable capacity. Many of the threats to the high seas are well documented. Overfishing has pushed some species toward collapse and changed food webs in ways that are hard to reverse. Industrial shipping contributes to climate change and introduces noise, pollution, and invasive species. Interest in deep-sea mining has grown even as scientists caution that the ecological costs are poorly understood. These are not mysteries. They are governance problems.
The high seas have never been lawless. But they have been managed through a patchwork of sectoral bodies. Regional fisheries management organizations oversee fishing in many areas, with uneven authority and uneven compliance. The International Maritime Organization sets global standards for shipping, but its rules are shaped by a blend of safety, trade, and politics. The International Seabed Authority is meant to regulate mining in the “Area,” yet it faces pressure from both states seeking access and those seeking restraint. None of these institutions was designed to treat biodiversity as the organizing principle. Each regulates a slice of activity. Biodiversity has been the leftover category.
BBNJ attempts to close that gap without replacing existing bodies. That design is pragmatic, but it creates friction. The treaty’s conservation ambitions will have to mesh with organizations that already guard their mandates. Disputes over authority are likely. Fishing states will worry that marine protected areas could become indirect restrictions on access. Conservation advocates will worry that the treaty will be diluted by compromise. Both concerns are plausible. A system built from overlapping jurisdictions is rarely neat.
The treaty opens doors. It also relies on systems that do not yet exist.
One assumption is that transparency will create discipline. Environmental impact assessments are familiar within national jurisdictions. On the high seas they have been inconsistent, opaque, or absent. BBNJ’s requirement to assess and disclose impacts, alongside a shared clearing-house mechanism, is a bet that shared information can narrow the space for harmful activities to proceed unnoticed. It is a reasonable bet. But a clearing-house can become an operational tool or a passive archive. The difference is not technical. It is political and procedural. Who must submit information, in what format, on what timetable, and with what consequences for non-compliance will determine whether the system matters.
Another assumption is that designation will lead to protection. Even in coastal waters, marine protected areas on paper do not necessarily change behavior at sea. Enforcement can be uneven. On the high seas, it will be harder. Patrol vessels are scarce and expensive. Legal processes are slow. The actors involved are mobile, and the incentives to cheat can be strong. If the early protected areas created under BBNJ are poorly designed or weakly defended, they may become symbols that invite cynicism. If they are few but credible, they can establish precedents that others follow.
A third assumption is that benefit-sharing over genetic resources can be made workable. Deep-sea microbes, corals, and sponges are increasingly valuable to pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. Developing countries have argued that benefits derived from these resources should be shared, since the high seas are legally a global commons. The treaty creates a framework, but key details are deferred to future decisions. That compromise helped secure agreement. It also ensures that one of the treaty’s most sensitive questions will remain contested. The danger is that the argument over genetic resources absorbs time and attention while more immediate conservation measures stall.
The hinge, though, is capacity. Many poorer countries lack the scientific infrastructure to monitor distant waters or participate fully in new governance systems. Without addressing that imbalance, the treaty’s reach will be narrow. Capacity building is sometimes treated as a diplomatic concession. In practice it is a condition of legitimacy. If only a handful of wealthy states can propose protected areas, conduct credible assessments, and interpret data streams, the high seas will remain governed by an unequal distribution of information. That is a recipe for mistrust, and mistrust is corrosive to multilateral systems.
Capacity is also where the treaty intersects most clearly with technology. The tools for monitoring the ocean have improved sharply in the past decade. Satellite tracking, synthetic-aperture radar, and machine-learning analysis can detect suspicious fishing behavior, identify vessels that “go dark,” and map patterns that once required months of manual work. Public data platforms have made some of this information accessible beyond governments. The result is a kind of transparency that the high seas have never had. It does not substitute for enforcement, but it changes the odds. It becomes harder to claim ignorance. It becomes easier to coordinate pressure.
This is the part of the story that is often missed by people who think of conservation as primarily a question of protected areas. The future of high seas governance will be shaped as much by information systems as by lines drawn on maps. A treaty that leans on impact assessments and shared reporting assumes that if evidence is visible and comparable, harmful activities will become harder to defend. That can work. It can also fail if data remains fragmented, if standards are weak, or if political incentives reward denial.
The climate dimension adds urgency. The high seas are not just a theater of biodiversity loss. The high seas play a major role in regulating the climate. They absorb heat, store carbon, and circulate nutrients. They also host industries that contribute to emissions, particularly shipping. The treaty does not directly regulate shipping emissions. That remains the domain of the International Maritime Organization. BBNJ strengthens the legal case for treating high seas activities as environmental decisions, not just commercial ones. It reinforces the idea that the ocean is a shared system with shared stakes, and that activities in international waters have environmental consequences that must be assessed and disclosed. Over time, that logic may strengthen pressure for more ambitious climate action in maritime sectors.
The treaty’s supporters often point to the global pledge to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030. The number has value as a signal. It also carries a risk. Targets can encourage a race to declare protected areas that are easy to announce and hard to defend. The more meaningful measure may be whether BBNJ produces a small number of well-designed, well-monitored protected areas that create precedents others can follow. Early successes will matter. So will early failures.
None of this will be settled quickly. A preparatory commission is working through the rules needed for the first conference of parties, due later in 2026. Funding mechanisms, institutional staffing, and procedures for proposing protected areas remain to be finalized. These details are where treaties either become real or remain ceremonial. They are also where the patience of states is tested. Many countries are skilled at signing agreements. Fewer are skilled at sustaining them, especially when compliance requires money, expertise, and political attention over many years.
BBNJ will not, by itself, reverse decades of damage. It will not stop illegal fishing overnight. It will not resolve disputes over seabed mining. It will not guarantee that benefits from genetic resources are shared fairly. What it does do is alter the legal landscape of the open ocean. For the first time, biodiversity in the global commons is not an afterthought. That shift is modest on paper and large in implication.
The high seas have long been a place where responsibility thins out. Distance makes harm more difficult to evade, and uncertainty makes it easier to postpone action. BBNJ is an attempt to make responsibility harder to avoid, and to make it possible for states to act collectively in a space that has been managed as a set of separate industries. Whether January 17th marks a turning point will depend on what follows: the strength of the rules that get written, the credibility of the data that gets shared, and the willingness of countries to treat the open ocean as something they are capable of governing, not simply using.
Header image: Southern right whales in South Africa. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler
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