UN Treaty For High Seas

To ensure the conservation of species and their environment, a new United Nations treaty on the sustainable use and protection of the High Seas has finally been drafted after a two-week round-the-clock marathon of talks in New York.

The agreed framework has overhauled the requirements of environmental impact assessments for natural resource extraction and set a universal standard for the procedure of conducting them and reporting findings. Furthermore, the treaty would grant the parties to the treaty the right to establish conservation zones and protected areas in international waters, where no country would normally be able to enforce law.

TWO YEARS BACK

Two years ago, the concept of protecting 30 of the land and oceans on Earth for the purpose of conservation was advanced at one of the summits on the parties to the Paris Climate Agreement, and many conservationists see this new treaty as the best hope of achieving that landmark.

GNN has reported on findings that when the entirety of a marine ecosystem is preserved, fishing industries benefit even if a season only lasts a short period, Among the hopes of the signees will be that diminishing catch rates for prized fish like tuna can be permanently reversed.

UN DECISIONS

Among the work still to be done will be to decide how marine protected areas in international waters will be established, managed, and the protections on them enforced. As was seen when the US, France, UK, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel failed to ratify the UN ban on nuclear weapons, adopted by over 140 countries in the year 2020, or as several nations unwillingness to implement the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, the UN has little power to force nations into compliance which dont adopt the treaty into their own law.