The UN has called on countries to swiftly ratify the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdictions (BBNJ) agreement, with 59 more to go after Chile this week became the first country to do so.
The long-awaited BBNJ agreement, also known as the High Seas Treaty, was signed in September last year after more than a decade of negotiations. The treaty provides for the global governance of 95% of the ocean’s volume under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
While 84 states have signed the agreement, the treaty will only enter into force when a minimum of 60 states have ratified it.
“We don’t want BBNJ implementation to take decades the way the treaty itself took. We have to get this done quickly. Nature-positive blue economy is what we should all be fighting for”, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for the ocean, Peter Thomson, said during a high seas session at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Greenpeace called the step taken by Chile “historic”, news outlet EFE reported.
“It’s wonderful that Chile is the first country that has now ratified the treaty, but the job is not done,” said Andrew Steer, president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, during the panel discussion.
The BBNJ sets out the procedures to establish globally recognised, large-scale marine protected areas (MPAs) outside the national jurisdictions.
“Until recently, the ocean outside the areas within national jurisdictions, which goes out 200 miles from the shore, has not had much governance. There was no legal mechanism to create protected areas there,” said Monica Medina, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Medina served as US assistant secretary for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs until Apr. 2023, pushing for an agreement on BBNJ.
“Even as we think about protected areas of the high seas, that will help coastal fisheries because they are impacted by the way that high seas fishing is taking so much out of the ecosystem in general,” she said during the panel.
Preventing biodiversity loss is among the main goals of the BBNJ agreement, along with promoting equity and fairness, tackling environmental degradation, addressing pollution, and fighting climate change.
The treaty could play a critical role in meeting the target of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, set out by the Kunming-Montreal Global Framework (GBF) in 2022, Costa Rican minister of foreign affairs, Arnoldo Andre, said during the panel.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that over 1,550 of the 17,903 marine animals and plants in the world are threatened with extinction, mainly due to climate change and overfishing.
By Sergio Colombo – sergio@carbon-pulse.com
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