UN high seas treaty is a triumph, but it will need teeth to be effective

The ocean treaty is good news (High seas treaty: historic deal to protect international waters finally reached at UN, 5 March), promising to protect biodiversity in the high seas. It is a rare case of multilateralism in this century. But euphoria should be tempered by the realisation that giving it effective teeth will be enormously challenging.

It promises to create a body to manage conservation and establish marine protected areas in the high seas, the 64% of sea outside national exclusive economic zones. Those cheering the treaty should recall that the last great multilateral agreement, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), reached in 1982, set up a body to manage the international seabed and establish a benefit-sharing system.

That body, the International Seabed Authority, was not set up until 1994, and, 28 years later, has still not established a mining code or a sharing mechanism. It has also been chronically underfunded, with its headquarters in Kingston harbour, Jamaica.

Second, a sticking point in the negotiations of this new treaty was the sharing of benefits from “marine genetic resources”. How that has been fixed is unclear. There will surely be difficulty in sharing the benefits of the more than 13,000 patents already filed, all giving monopolistic profits for 20 years. Will the agreement apply retrospectively?

Finally, we should just remember that national marine protected areas are rarely protected. In most of Britain’s protected areas, industrial-scale bottom trawling has been allowed, and the government even blocked an amendment to its 2020 fisheries bill that would have banned it.Guy Standing Author, The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea

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