- With the High Seas Treaty in force, African proposals to designate marine protected areas in international waters are taking shape.
- Maritime security expert David Willima talks about why the West African marine protected area proposal is advanced and why others still require careful coordination.
- Willima says that with the current transformation marine governance is going through, African countries need to be actively engaged in order to have a voice in global decision-making.
Earlier this year, the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement, better known as the High Seas Treaty, entered into force, paving the way for protecting marine life in international waters. Countries in Latin America and West Africa are pushing to finalize proposals to establish their first marine protected areas, or MPAs, in the high seas. Still, much about the practical implementation of the BBNJ treaty, as it’s also known, remains unclear: How are high seas protected areas going to be enforced? Who will be responsible? How they will interact with existing structures of marine governance?
David Willima, maritime researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria, South Africa, routinely deals with such questions. Part of the ISS’s Climate Risk and Human Security Project, he focuses on maritime security, ocean governance, and the blue economy, working with governments, the African Union (AU), and other stakeholders to improve their capacity to deal with maritime issues. Willima started engaging more closely with BBNJ-related issues in 2022 and has since been involved in creating awareness and capacity building around the High Seas Treaty. More recently, he has supported the IUCN, the global nature conservation authority, in engaging with countries and the AU specifically in the Western Indian Ocean region.
Mongabay’s Victoria Schneider spoke to Willima by phone about the current state of the treaty’s implementation, its significance for Africa, and the outstanding challenges, including the persistence of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Mongabay: West Africa is advancing with a high seas MPA proposal in the Canary and Guinea Currents Convergence Zone. Other MPAs in the high seas are planned in East and Southwest Africa. Where do these plans stand?
David Willima: West Africa, and ECOWAS [Economic Community of West African States] is very far advanced, and from what I understand, stakeholders across those countries are moving towards a designated area. I think there are a few reasons for that: ECOWAS [countries] have the right institutions in place and are well-coordinated, from maritime security to broader ocean governance.
On the East [African] side, things are a bit more complicated, and it comes down to what I’d call the geometry of the region. If you compare Africa to the Pacific Island states, [the latter] have large EEZs [exclusive economic zones] that connect in an almost uninterrupted way to the high seas. In Africa, you have EEZs that overlap with continental shelf claims, African island states, and continental coastal states — it’s like a mosaic. The areas of potential contention are greater.
Namibia and South Africa, for example, have extended continental shelf applications, which impact where any MPA boundaries could fall, and they have genuine questions about what an MPA designation would mean for them. The BBNJ agreement does address this, I believe it’s Article 5 that speaks to priority being given to existing regional agreements and RFMOs [regional fisheries management organizations], but there are still real concerns that need to be answered before those countries can move forward.
Mongabay: What are the biggest obstacles to getting the Saya de Malha off East Africa and the Walvis Ridge off Southwest Africa MPAs off the ground?
David Willima: The questions governments have are mostly about their own economic interests: fisheries, extended continental shelf claims, and, increasingly, deep-sea mining. Because of the geometry I described, the high seas in this region are very closely connected to African coastal waters. That makes it very easy for distant-water fishing fleets like [those from] Taiwan or wherever to move between international waters and coastal waters, especially since African states largely lack the capacity to patrol even their own EEZs, let alone the high seas. When vessels switch off their [tracking] systems, there’s essentially no enforcement. It’s what makes Africa the continent that suffers most from IUU fishing. We lose, conservatively, over $10 billion a year to it, and that figure is probably much higher now.
Experts in the Gulf of Guinea are concerned that if high seas MPAs restrict what distant-water fleets can do out there, will they simply move into coastal waters instead? They’ve been doing this anyway, but it could intensify. For me, that’s exactly why the High Seas Treaty has to be accompanied by investment in surveillance capacity, data sharing, and enforcement. It also has to work simultaneously with the WTO Fisheries Subsidies Agreement. If these fleets continue being subsidized, they’ll continue what they’re doing regardless of MPA designations. The fact that both agreements are coming into force around the same time is genuinely positive, and it presents African states with a real opportunity.
Mongabay: Can you talk about Saya de Malha, how important is it ecologically, and what challenges the area is facing?
David Willima: Saya de Malha is ecologically, economically and culturally significant. The connectivity of this area is remarkable, but because almost no one knows it exists, it’s essentially unprotected and heavily plundered. It’s mostly tuna that’s being targeted. [The area] sits along the arc of islands between Madagascar, Seychelles and Mauritius. Because those high seas areas are so closely connected to African coastal waters, it’s straightforward for fleets to operate there without consequence. A fisheries scientist told me at PrepCom earlier this year that a significant portion of global high seas IUU fishing happens in waters adjacent to Africa, and nowhere else. Africa engages very little, if at all, in high seas fishing — we don’t have the capacity, yet we suffer the most from it.
But Saya de Malha is also home to continuous high seas seagrass beds making it an important carbon sink and crucial habitat for marine megafauna. And while Mauritius and Seychelles share joint jurisdiction over the seabed and subsoil resources, the overlying water column remains international waters, which has created an enforcement gap for long-distance fisheries and shipping regulations.
Mongabay: The first BBNJ Conference of the Parties (COP) is scheduled to take place at the United Nations headquarters in January 2027. Where does Africa stand with regards to the ratification of the treaty?
David Willima: Africa is currently sitting at 19 ratifications, with others that have completed their domestic processes but haven’t submitted their instruments yet, and around 36 signatures. The COP is the critical next step, because if you have fully ratified, you have decision-making power. It will matter where the secretariat is based — will it be in China, in Chile, or, if it ends up in Belgium, there will be real issues around data, equity, and sovereignty.
But my bigger concern is, what is the African story going into COP? What voices, what science, are we bringing? Are we going to defer to Western scientific standards, or are we going to bring our own, including Indigenous knowledge systems? The honest answer right now is that we don’t have enough high seas experts on the continent, but there is a lot of incredible work that has been done over the years that should be part of the African package.
Mongabay: You mentioned deep-sea mining. Is that on Africa’s radar?
David Willima: It should be, and it’s interconnected with everything else. A lot of the minerals being targeted for deep-sea mining — copper, cobalt, nickel — are the same ones that African terrestrial mining countries depend on. If deep-sea mining floods the market, prices fall and African economies suffer. Meanwhile, the royalties that would come to African sponsoring states are, according to most projections, not worth the liability risks involved. And many states are being sold the opportunity by mining companies without being told the full picture.
There’s also the tension with the BBNJ treaty itself. BBNJ is very pro-conservation. It’s built around marine genetic resources [MGRs], equity, and environmental protection. Deep-sea mining is inherently destructive, and many of those MGRs that the treaty seeks to protect come from the very seabed areas that mining would destroy. The ISA [International Seabed Authority] mining code is still being finalized, and there’s a rush by the industry to get the code done before adequate environmental safeguards are in place. The U.S. is pushing to mine unilaterally, and I’ve learned that China has been using research vessels in a covert way to map out areas. It’s become a geopolitical contest.
For Africa, the point I keep making is that it’s not enough to engage only on BBNJ. You have to be present and coordinated across BBNJ, fisheries subsidies, and the ISA simultaneously, or you risk losing on all three.
Mongabay: What are you expecting from African states going forward?
David Willima: There’s more positivity than people realize. Malawi recently became the 41st country, and the only African landlocked country, to support a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining. Their reasoning is sound: they see the ocean’s role in climate regulation as critical for an agriculture-dependent country, and they’ve had firsthand experience of the devastation Cyclone Freddy caused in the Western Indian Ocean. That kind of leadership from a landlocked country is remarkable. Kenya and Madagascar just followed, now there are 43 countries globally.
There are also positive developments in maritime security. Some countries in the Gulf of Guinea have pooled resources to create a combined maritime task force to fight IUU fishing. And from a science perspective, we know more about these issues than we did even a few years ago. New satellite tools for monitoring and surveillance are making a real difference. I think we’re in a better position than we’ve ever been to hold our leaders accountable and push these issues forward.
Banner image: A view of Ngor Bay in Dakar, Senegal. Image by Jeff Attaway via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Cite this article
Victoria Schneider (2026). What will Africa’s story on ocean governance be? Interview with David Willima. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-323060Credits
