The geopolitics of the global oceans treaty
It has been hailed as a diplomatic triumph, but some worry it could become a vehicle to increase China’s influence over the high seas
Kenza Bryan in London
The Sargasso Sea is often covered in rafts of sargassum, an unusual bulbous seaweed that forms a floating surface in which tuna, dolphinfish and crabs raise their young.
The fishing vessels that criss-cross this 4mn sq km of water, the world’s only sea defined by ocean currents rather than a coastline, bear the flags of Spain, Taiwan, the US and China and are a constant threat to its marine life.
On the sea floor off its eastern flank, Russia and other countries are exploring how they might extract copper, silver and gold from the rich polymetallic sulphides that spew from volcanic vents.
Negotiators of the new UN Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty say it could start to curb this rush for the marine resources — provided that major powers, which tend to value oceans for their fishing grounds, oil reserves and shipping lanes rather than their biodiversity, can be persuaded to support it.
The US administration of President Donald Trump has already indicated it will not.
“Trump does not care, [JD] Vance does not care,” says Steven Groves, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a special assistant to Trump during his first term in office.
“They’re not bound by the terms of treaties they don’t sign.
Let China do what it wants to do.”
China has both ratified the agreement, often known simply as the global oceans treaty, and bid to host the treaty organisation’s secretariat — a position that would give the country considerable influence over its funding and future direction.
Some believe China is motivated by a wider geopolitical agenda and a desire to protect its substantial fishing industry, rather than any deep commitment to ocean conservation.
“China now has a very great interest in presenting itself as the reasonable guy in the room,” including to make other states more “positively disposed” to its South China Sea territorial claims, says Andrew Serdy, a professor in public international law at the University of Southampton.
“It’s got its own fairly heavy baggage, but if it thinks it can help here it’s to be welcomed.”
Beijing’s bid follows an effort to link climate and environmental action to multilateralism at recent UN climate change gatherings and G20 summits.
China also helped oversee a 2022 biodiversity summit at which attending countries agreed the “30 by 30” commitment to protect almost a third of oceans by the end of the decade.
The country’s push to host the treaty’s implementing body will be a key topic on the sidelines of the first post-ratification meeting in New York this month.
Megan Randles, political lead for the high seas at Greenpeace International, says China’s effort to create a competitive bid to lead the treaty’s implementation is “exciting” and follows similar bids by Chile and Belgium.
“We have Russia and Trump as tricky characters, so it’s great we’ve got one of the superpowers very engaged,” she adds.
The legally binding agreement, which came into force in January and has now been ratified by more than 80 countries, is meant to give national governments a forum to designate, fund and govern protected zones, and to peacefully resolve who profits from lucrative genetic resources found at sea that could feed pharmaceutical discoveries.
But achieving these goals in an era of intense discord between the nations whose economic or military might underpins international law will be extraordinarily difficult, experts in ocean governance say.
Russia has not even signed the treaty; India has pledged to ratify it but has not completed the process.
“This is the inherent vulnerability of law of the sea,” says Monica Medina, who helped negotiate the treaty while assistant oceans secretary in the Biden administration.
“In parts of the world without borders, people can free ride.”
Some 95 per cent of the world’s ocean by volume is high seas, and less than 1 per cent of this is currently protected.
Ocean acidification, pollution, warming, overfishing and disputes over sovereignty are multiplying.
“We’re worried that time is running out,” says Randles.
“We want a network, whole ecosystems, migratory routes, whale routes, not just politically convenient areas — for the whole ocean to be seen as one ecosystem.”
Some environmentalists regard the oceans treaty — completed after a year in which Trump torpedoed a deal to impose a carbon levy on shipping and withdrew from the Paris Agreement on global warming — as a diplomatic triumph.
It is meant to bring about some of the co-operation to which the 1982 Law of the Sea treaty aspired, and fill in any gaps.
This includes the treaty’s approach to marine protection, genetic materials, environmental impact assessments and transfers of marine technologies — superseding a patchwork of protections in marine biodiversity hotspots.
Others caution that while it is well-intentioned, it will have little practical effect.
“Of course there shouldn’t be euphoria at the passage of it,” says Guy Standing, an economist and author of The Blue Commons.
He adds that irrespective of its advent, the high seas are becoming more, not less, lawless.
“It’s not a time for great optimism, but it is a time when we should be shouting the alarm,” Standing says.
“How are we holding the rogues to account?
The answer is we’re not doing that.”
He warns that countries including the US and China could be heading towards active conflict at sea over critical minerals or genetic resources this decade, while vast destructive fishing fleets continue to operate with impunity.
US-based or US-listed companies have pushed to start mining the seabed, after Trump issued an executive order last April intended to speed up the process of issuing exploration licences in areas beyond US territorial waters.
Countries led by France maintain that seabed mining could do irreparable damage to the rare fauna and flora at the bottom of the ocean and that seabed mining in open waters before a set of rules is codified would be against international law.
The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management last month proposed to further weaken the environmental review process related to deep-sea mining.
“They’re going to mine the deep-sea bed even though the rest of the world will be up in arms about it,” says Groves, the former Trump adviser.
“The days of sitting around gnawing on your nails wondering if you’re the perceived world leader of something are gone.”
Previous attempts to protect biodiversity in the open oceans have underdelivered.
A global goal to protect a tenth of oceans by 2020 was not met, and some of the zones created were dubbed “paper parks” because their protections were weak, difficult to enforce or in areas where resource exploitation was in any case limited.
The UK is one of the few countries to have met the subsequent “30 by 30” goal in its own territorial waters.
But only a handful of more than 300 marine protection areas it designated are fully protected from fishing, with bottom trawling widespread across the others.
Extrapolating the recent rate of marine protected area creation, it could take well into the next century to meet the 30 by 30 target, according to Greenpeace analysis.
Beijing’s involvement has the potential to disrupt conservation efforts — or galvanise them.
Hosting the High Seas treaty could allow it to convene and direct planned annual summits, known as Ocean COPs, which will review proposals by scientific and technical bodies yet to be created.
Its pitch earlier this year to host the high seas treaty organisation, decorated with hearts and dolphins, contained an offer to pay for some poorer countries to attend the summits through funds established by the treaty.
It described its proposed host city of Xiamen, a port overlooking the Taiwan Strait, as the “garden city on the sea”.
In recent weeks, China has hosted bilateral meetings in New York with treaty signatories to push its bid, according to a person familiar with the matter.
A decision is expected by January 2027.
In its pitch document, the country stated that it is a “strong promoter of the BBNJ agreement” and that marine environmental protection is a “priority”.
But while China has offered cash and convening power, sceptics point out that it has previously chafed at the idea of protected marine zones, which could increase the pressure to abide by international norms at sea.
Medina, the former assistant oceans secretary, says China was one of the most reluctant signatories of the agreement, pushing back on its content both in bilateral talks with the US under Biden and in open forums.
China also balked at the idea of sharing proceeds from marine genetic resources and feared it would have to cede control of shipping lanes.
Alongside Russia, it pushed for countries to slow down negotiations.
“They were concerned about over-regulation, fishing rights . . . or their control over certain areas that they believed belonged to them,” Medina says.
Also with Russia, China has helped block efforts over the past decade to create new marine protected areas at the body tasked with protecting Antarctic marine life, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.
Official observers at the International Seabed Authority, the Jamaica-based body that co-ordinates global efforts to formulate rules for deep-sea mining, say that China’s influence there may be growing: it is the body’s largest funder and holds more exploration licences than any other country.
Following a number of meetings with Chinese officials, the ISA’s secretary-general, Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho, recently backed a position previously put forward by China and other countries, stipulating that a global agreement on deep-sea mining could be fast-tracked this year even if some final details have yet to be agreed.
The ISA said in a statement that there was “no suggestion of lowering ambition” and that adopting rules “rooted in the precautionary principle” could help avoid a “Wild West” where each nation makes up its own.
“The benefits from the resources of the deep seabed belong to us all, and are not, as has historically been the case, the spoils of the most powerful countries or companies.
Therefore, developing a mechanism to deliver on this is the absolute essence of ISA’s work.”
Battles over deep-sea mining, as well as constant tension between China and its neighbours over areas of the South China Sea, offer a foretaste of the difficulties inherent in enforcing the law of the sea.
“There’s only so much you can do if a country decides, like China has, to ignore it,” Medina adds.
“We will have to have systems of co-operation that go beyond the mere words on the page.”
Ahead of next month’s treaty talks in New York, coalitions of countries are already working to speed up the process for setting up marine protected areas.
Chile led the creation of a first movers’ initiative, a group of west African countries has started work on a proposal for a protected area, and France is co-leading an initiative for countries that back the treaty and also oppose deep-sea mining.
They hope that multilateral events held on Pacific islands ahead of November’s annual UN climate gathering, COP31 in Turkey, can focus the world’s attention on ocean protection and kick-start negotiations over new marine protected areas.
Treaty participants could also focus on tackling what experts describe as low-hanging fruit: the vested interests that govern regional fisheries bodies, the damage caused by overfishing and the absence of independent monitors on most large fishing vessels.
“Without a framework it would have been difficult to get anything done that would have the credibility and legitimacy internationally,” warns Pradeep Singh, a senior adviser at the Oceano Azul Foundation, which hosts the secretariat for the ocean protection coalition led by France, Panama and Tuvalu.
He describes treaty ratification as a “victory” and remains optimistic that states can swiftly put aside political differences.
But he adds that “it’s just the beginning, with a lot of potential obstacles in the path”.
An important task for the New York gathering will be to draft financial rules for the treaty secretariat, in the absence of US contributions.
The ISA, an equivalent body, has a 2026 budget of about $10.8mn.
The talks will need to propose rules as to how the treaty’s implementing bodies will work, how quickly they’ll be able to move, how transparently and with what enforcement mechanisms.
They will also propose an agenda for annual summits of countries that have ratified the treaty and work out sharing benefits from genetic material and environmental impact assessments for prospective industries such as carbon dioxide removal at sea.
Another objective is to give financiers the confidence to back the creation of protected areas, knowing they are unlikely to be challenged, so as to speed up the rate at which such areas are established.
The Minderoo Foundation, a philanthropy founded by Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest, has committed tens of millions to creating marine protected areas and is planning to increase the sums it disburses.
The organisation is focused on the potential for the Lord Howe Rise, a deep-sea plateau in the south-west Pacific Ocean, to become a marine protected area providing a breeding ground or migration corridor for species including wandering albatrosses and humpback whales.
Rapid ocean warming, acidification and pollution make the need for this kind of action urgent, marine naturalists say.
They hope that newer protected areas will cover interconnected parts of the ocean known to be areas of breeding, feeding or migration.
A three-week Greenpeace expedition to the Sargasso Sea in 2024 found local scientists warning that sargassum seaweed, along with other species like anchovies, had started to appear less regularly and in less abundance.
It also helped identify deep-sea lanternfish and marine mammals such as spotted dolphins and South American sea lions in the area.
“It’s going to require a major effort to mobilise a monitoring and governing process for what happens in the high seas, and at the moment it’s wishful thinking,” says Standing, the economist and ocean governance specialist.
“As long as Trump is in the White House, it’s hard to be confident in any way,” he adds.
“Might is right, and they will win and take what they want.”
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