Protection of the world’s oceans: “Implementation is crucial”

There are still a few points of contention at the UN Conference on the Protection of the High Seas. Nevertheless, in the interview, Environment Minister Lemke was optimistic that an agreement could be reached. However, the implementation afterwards is crucial.

tagesschau.de: Ms. Lemke, when we talk about the high seas, what are we talking about?

Steffi Lemke: We are talking about an area for which there are hardly any factors for the protection of the marine environment. That means the high seas, where we currently only have the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea for shipping, for example.

And now the international community is negotiating, for the first time for the high seas, to define binding protection goals and to make binding protection regulations within the framework of the United Nations. It would be a historic breakthrough if that were to happen.

Few rules so far

tagesschau.de: Why are there no regulations for this area yet?

lemke: It’s a huge area. If we look at how far the earth is covered by the world’s oceans, then that’s an almost unimaginably large area. Defining protection regulations there is actually relatively difficult. And at the level of the United Nations, regulations for shipping had been agreed in recent decades. We also discuss whether deep-sea mining should be allowed. Here the Federal Government is of the opinion: As long as we still have no knowledge whatsoever of potential damage, we should not do this.

And now, for the first time, it’s about being able to define protected areas there that were previously only possible in the coastal seas or in the exclusive economic zones of the respective countries. And now on the high seas, satellite technology enables us for the first time to be able to monitor such binding regulations.

“The world’s oceans are essential for our survival”

tagesschau.de: What do you know about the high seas and the deep sea? Why is protection so important?

lemke: Because the oceans are generally of essential importance to us. They are essential for our survival, for oxygen production, but above all for climate regulation. And of course they are a very large repository of biological diversity, which we do not even know about in the deep sea and have not yet explored at all.

And the question of whether we can reach the Montreal Agreement – last December it was agreed in the World Conservation of Nature Convention to place 30 percent of the world’s oceans under protection – also depends on whether this high seas protection agreement can be concluded, to which the international community of states will then commit itself would have to specify.

Important details

tagesschau.de: At the moment it looks like the negotiations have stalled a bit. It’s about when who will check whether certain things are damaging the deep and high seas. How far are these negotiations at these points?

lemke: The negotiations have been going on for several years and, like many other international agreements, have been severely delayed by Corona. That’s why I’m glad that this round of negotiations is definitely taking place in New York and will hopefully achieve a breakthrough or at least take many steps forward.

The geopolitical situation has not become any easier for such agreements. But when I see that the International Conservation of Nature Convention was reached in Montreal, I also hope that we can take big steps here with the detailed questions – how the protection mechanisms take place, how controls take place, which institution actually takes over the control and how the financing takes place go forward, which at the end of the day will also be enough for a breakthrough.

“Restart for the protection of the high seas”

tagesschau.de: What is the German position? Who should protect the deep sea and the high sea and when?

lemke: The most important thing for me is that we get a binding agreement that as many states as possible will join. At the moment I’m very confident about the number of states. And we would then have to set up a protection mechanism that, similar to the climate protection agreement or the international nature conservation agreement, would also monitor the rules and compliance and implement them in the first place.

We are still much further along in the beginning here than we are with the climate protection agreement and the international nature conservation agreement. In other words, it would mean a restart for the protection of the high seas if we got the agreement right. And the institution would then have to be set up within the framework of the United Nations. But there are many experiential processes for this. The key is to get the political breakthrough. The technical regulations are then not rocket science.

Sticking point finances

tagesschau.de: Another point of contention seems to be the management of marine genetic resources. This means that if, for example, medicines are obtained from marine organisms, poorer countries demand financial compensation if industrialized nations make profits from it. What is the German position on this?

lemke: In general, this is an increasingly difficult point of discussion when it comes to the question of nature use in international agreements, including in the case of protected areas on land. This was also one of the main points of discussion at the Montreal Agreement. The concerns of countries with a particularly high level of biological diversity are of course entirely justified, and we negotiated an additional funding commitment in Montreal.

And here, too, the countries that benefit most from such developments would then make compensation payments via a fund – for which there are already existing financing instruments. The question is whether there is the political will to make a sufficiently large sum available for this. But if we want nature to be protected and less polluted than before, then we also need global compensation.

“Makes me confident”

tagesschau.de: In your opinion, how big is the political will?

lemke: I think it’s gotten a lot bigger in recent years because we’re getting more and more knowledge that the ocean is so incredibly important for climate regulation and that it therefore needs protection. On the other hand, the demands for use have increased, extending more beyond the national borders of the respective states and their coastal waters and exclusive economic zone onto the high seas. Attempts are being made to develop more and more uses there. Deep sea mining is one of the areas.

That is why it has become clear that we need rules and that it is not enough to regulate shipping, but that we also have to regulate uses that go beyond this. And the fact that Montreal worked out despite the difficult geopolitical situation, that the states said: ‘We want to protect nature better worldwide’, makes me confident that we can at least make big strides forward here, because humanity understands that we at least use nature based on rules, because otherwise it would be the right of the strongest.

Implementation is important

tagesschau.de: There were very tough negotiations in Montreal. Are such huge conferences still effective at all?

lemke: If I take Montreal as an example, definitely yes. A major breakthrough has been achieved there. It has been established that the use of pesticides must be reduced worldwide and that environmentally harmful subsidies must be phased out.

And there were also industrialized countries, China, which was the negotiating leader, and India were involved, so there were also emerging countries, which are currently undergoing very strong development. And yet these strong protection goals were set. This was a historic breakthrough, comparable to the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The decisive question is whether the countries are now actually implementing it as part of their national responsibility. That does not mean so much the international commitment to protection, but the national implementation in reality. And that’s where things went wrong in the past, both in terms of climate protection and the protection of nature.

But that is also our responsibility. That’s why we in the federal government are also struggling to find out how we can promote nature conservation and climate protection. And that’s why, in my view, the international negotiation level is a tailwind for what we as governments in the respective countries then actually have to implement.

Difficult implementation

tagesschau.de: But wouldn’t it make more sense if industrialized countries or rich countries like Germany took even clearer steps?

lemke: Yes, I agree with you. We have done this in nature conservation and also in climate protection in many areas. We are also pulling other countries with us. However, we are now responsible for implementing our own goals in Germany, both for climate protection and for nature conservation, to comply with the climate protection goals and the biodiversity goals.

And then, as is almost always the case with such things, we come up against the limits of what is politically possible in a governing coalition in which we are in a federal state. The municipalities have to go along with it, the municipalities and the citizens have to be taken along. Putting all of this into practice now is what makes the difficulty after the international decision.

More speed needed

tagesschau.de: Many scientists are now saying that the time window for exactly this work will not be open for very long. What are you saying? How much speed would you have to go to do that?

lemke: We have brought speed into this level, both with the action program for natural climate protection, with which we are now making really large financial sums available for nature conservation and renaturation in Germany for the first time. We want to use four billion in the next four years, that’s a paradigm shift for nature conservation in Germany.

And we’ve also knocked the brakes off the expansion of renewable energies and are in the process of taking very strong steps forward in both wind power and photovoltaics.

One notices that different political decisions are now being pushed than those of the previous governments. But we have now been in office for a good year and of course we have not yet been able to cope with everything that has been neglected in recent years and decades. It is therefore important that the citizens can go along with us, that together we can achieve such transformation processes for more nature and climate protection. And of course we have to maintain what defines an industrial location like Germany. And that is now on the way with hydrogen technology, renewable energies for climate protection and renaturation for nature conservation.