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The Ship Has Reached the Shore: The High Seas Treaty Explained

Release Date: 08/26/2026

How To Protect The Ocean

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How To Protect The Ocean

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84 Percent: Inside the Worst Coral Bleaching Event Ever Recorded

How To Protect The Ocean

This year, most of the coral on the planet went through heat stress severe enough to bleach it. That's not a rounding error: 84 percent of the world's reef area, across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, and NOAA had to add three brand-new alert levels to its Coral Reef Watch scale because the existing one had no category for what was happening. In this episode, Andrew breaks down exactly where global coral reefs stand right now: how the fourth global mass bleaching event on record got declared, why NOAA waited until 2026 to confirm it had actually ended, and why every global bleaching...

Everyone in the Tent: How Ocean Treaties Actually Get Made

How To Protect The Ocean

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How To Protect The Ocean

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The Ship Has Reached the Shore: The High Seas Treaty Explained

How To Protect The Ocean

There's a video online of a room full of exhausted diplomats breaking into applause after nearly 20 years of work. One woman brings down the gavel and says, "the ship has reached the shore." That moment, in March 2023, closed out a negotiation that had already failed once in public. It became binding international law this year, and the fight over what it actually protects is happening right now. In this episode, Andrew traces the full history of the High Seas Treaty, formally the BBNJ Agreement (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction): from the idea first raised at a UN Oceans working...

Corals Nearly as Old as the Pyramids, and the Fight to Save Them

How To Protect The Ocean

Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, a coral colony has been growing since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished. One deep-water black coral off the coast of Hawaii has been dated at 4,270 years old, making it one of the oldest living skeleton-building organisms known to science. A single pass of a bottom trawl net can wipe out that kind of habitat in seconds, and it's a fight that's still being decided this very year at the United Nations. In this episode, Andrew breaks down why bottom trawling is such a hard problem to regulate. It's rarely the fish stock itself that takes the...

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How To Protect The Ocean

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How To Protect The Ocean

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5,000 New Species Prove the "Ocean Desert" Deep Sea Mining Claim Is Wrong

How To Protect The Ocean

In September 2021, Time magazine profiled Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), and his push to mine the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a stretch of international seabed between Hawaii and Mexico. In that profile, Barron called the CCZ "the most desert-like place on the planet," arguing that mining the deep sea does less environmental harm than mining a rainforest because there's supposedly so little life down there to disturb. That single line has been repeated for years as justification for deep sea mining. Andrew puts it to the test. The science tells a very different story. A...

More Episodes

In this episode, Andrew traces the full history of the High Seas Treaty, formally the BBNJ Agreement (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction): from the idea first raised at a UN Oceans working session in 2004, through nine years of debating whether a treaty was even needed, to the failed 2022 negotiating session, to the breakthrough text agreed in March 2023. He breaks down the treaty's four pillars, benefit-sharing from marine genetic resources, marine protected areas in international waters, environmental impact assessments for new high seas activity, and capacity building for coastal nations that can't afford their own deep-sea research fleets, and explains why each one was a genuine sticking point between countries.

The treaty entered into force on January 17, 2026, making it binding law rather than a symbolic milestone. Roughly two thirds of the ocean lies beyond any single country's jurisdiction, and before this treaty, less than one percent of that area had any form of protection. Ratifications are still climbing, the first Conference of the Parties is expected in January 2027, and a long list of unresolved questions, from secretariat hosting to how marine protected areas actually get designated, will get fought out there. It's not a perfect treaty. It's a beginning.

Takeaways:

The High Seas Treaty (BBNJ) took roughly 20 years to negotiate, including a public failure at the fifth negotiating session in August 2022.
Agreement on the treaty text was reached March 4, 2023, after a marathon final session; it was formally adopted June 19, 2023.
The treaty rests on four pillars: marine genetic resource benefit-sharing, marine protected areas in international waters, environmental impact assessments, and capacity building/technology transfer.
It needed 60 ratifications to take effect. Morocco became the 60th ratifying country on September 19, 2025.
The treaty entered into force January 17, 2026, and now covers roughly two thirds of the ocean that previously had almost no protection.
The first Conference of the Parties (COP1) is expected in January 2027, where major unresolved issues get decided.

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