If there is a country that is connected to the sea, it is Panama. Only slightly larger than Bavaria, but blessed with a coastline longer than Denmark’s. The Caribbean on one side, the Pacific on the other, with the Panama Canal in the middle. And in this Panama there are ministers from all over the world these days. Her topic: Saving the oceans. Because at the end of this week there is a lot at stake for them.
Steffi Lemke is also here, you can reach her by phone on the way to the next meeting. “The debate is very, very intense at the moment,” she says. Deep-sea mining, plastic pollution, protected areas: there are plenty of topics for the group of pioneering states that are gathering in Panama, including the EU, China and the USA. “And the signal from here is important for moving forward in the political negotiations.”
If the countries participating in the Our Oceans Conference have their way, then, to stay with the metaphor, a wave will spill from Panama far down the Caribbean and then up the Atlantic, all the way up to New York. Since last week, the states have been negotiating there, at the headquarters of the United Nations, on “Biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction”. This international marine protection agreement, BBNJ for short, should finally set rules on the high seas.
“Right now a handful of mostly wealthy nations are exploiting the high seas”
Because it is a kind of wild west of the seas: an almost lawless space that belongs to nobody and therefore somehow to everyone. There are few laws protecting the sea and its inhabitants. The BBNJ agreement aims to change that. It’s a huge area: any area of sea more than 200 nautical miles from a coast is by definition open sea. That is about 60 percent of the sea and 43 percent of the earth’s surface. Most is deep sea.
For years, the United Nations has been negotiating an international, legally binding instrument to protect the seas; under the umbrella of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. But the pandemic delayed talks, and when state representatives met for the fifth session last August, they were unable to resolve all issues.
“At the moment, a handful of mostly wealthy nations are exploiting the high seas,” says Till Seidensticker, a marine expert at Greenpeace. According to the law of the sea, it is “the common heritage of mankind”, but because there are no rules, ecological aspects are usually even less taken into account than in maritime areas that are sovereign territory of a state.
According to Greenpeace, this has already caused serious damage. Many key species such as albatrosses, turtles and sharks have declined sharply in recent decades. Deep-sea habitats such as cold-water coral reefs and sponge gardens have been destroyed by trawling. From what is known, such destruction is particularly problematic in the deep sea: it takes a very long time for an ecosystem there to recover once it has been destroyed, because all processes are extremely slow due to the low temperatures and the darkness.
“For a long time there has been growing concern about the ever-increasing anthropogenic pressure on the marine environment from deep-sea activities such as fishing, mining, marine pollution and bioprospecting,” i.e. the study of living things for commercially valuable resources, said Alexander Proelss, an expert in international maritime law and environmental law at the University of Hamburg, the Science Media Center.
An important point in the negotiations in New York is therefore to set up marine protected areas on the high seas and to regulate how they are managed. “30 percent of the high seas should be protected,” says Seidensticker. In principle, the states had also agreed at the Montreal Conference on Endangered Species in December. So far, however, there is not even a body that could establish protected areas in international waters. That would have to be created first.
An agreement should also regulate how profits from the seas are distributed
Such protected areas would be refuges for fish and other sea creatures, where they could recover and reproduce undisturbed by human influences. Preserving the biodiversity of the high seas is also important in the fight against the climate crisis. “The marine life on the high seas drives the biological pump of the oceans,” says Seidensticker. “They take up carbon at the water’s surface and transport and store it at depth. Without this important achievement, our atmosphere would contain 50 percent more carbon dioxide. The Earth would be overheated and uninhabitable.”
Minister Lemke from Panama is also campaigning for this. In the fight against global warming, she says there, the seas are a strong ally. But these seas need allies for their part, “in every corner of the world”. In order to achieve the 30 percent target, the negotiations in New York are key. A “Paris moment” is needed there – like that rare moment in Paris in 2015, when the international community agreed on a new climate agreement. “We now need a universal protection agreement against exploitation and littering,” says the minister from Germany.
In addition to the question of protected areas, the High Seas Agreement is also intended to regulate which countries are to share in future profits arising from the exploration of marine resources. Concrete examples would be medicines or cosmetics made from animals or plants from the high seas. “One possible solution would be for the countries that use marine genetic resources to pay a flat fee,” says Ben Boteler from the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam. “This should then be distributed via a fund to the countries that do not use the resources.”
Both conferences, the one in New York and the one in Panama, end this Friday. From New York, where her marine commissioner Sebastian Unger is negotiating, there are at least hopeful signs, says Minister Lemke. But there are some pretty tough things to drill through, and that in difficult geopolitical times. “But we made it in Montreal,” says Lemke, “and we’ll make it on the high seas too.” Already this Friday?
Doubts have recently grown in EU negotiating circles. The critical phase has begun, it said on Thursday, and there are more and more attempts to water down the rules, for example by excluding areas. Others called for unanimity before areas are designated – with the result that each state would have a veto. “There are red lines that we don’t follow,” says European circles. And unfortunately, the big politics at the headquarters of the United Nations cannot be completely ignored either: the UN Security Council sits just one floor above the marine conservationists.