Davos talks high seas treaty as first ratification in sight

“Until recently, the high seas have not had much governance,” said Monica Medina, president and chief executive of the Wildlife Conservation Society, kicking off a discussion at Davos about the potential offered by a history-making treaty to monitor and protect international waters.

“There was no way to create protected areas in the ocean… There was no way to protect, conserve and share the benefits of biodiversity beyond national jurisdictions with all the people of the Earth,” she said.

That changed last year when an agreement more than a decade in the making was signed by more than 80 countries. Now, the race is on to push countries to ratify the UN High Seas Treaty—officially known as the International legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction. The treaty comes into force once 60 countries have ratified it, with Chile taking steps last week towards becoming the first to do so. It also holds the opportunity for global governance of 95% of all ocean volume, addressing pollution, overfishing, climate change and biodiversity loss.

Once ratified, countries will be required to conduct environmental impact assessments (EIAs) before authorising marine activities such as deep-sea mining. The UN sees the treaty as playing an important role in its campaign to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030—itself a key target of the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

Discussing issues—and solutions—to the high-seas challenge, Ms Medina chaired a panel including representatives from the UN, government, private enterprise and philanthropy.

Talking to Economist Impact after the panel, Ms Medina spoke of the importance of multilateral co-operation in governing international oceans. “Every piece is important,” she said. “Governments have an important role to play because this is about governance. It’s really their lead. But you also need businesses to be willing to invest, and unless you have good governance and rules and an orderly process for accessing these resources, it’s hard for businesses to do that.

“You need philanthropic donors to help small-island developing states plan for the better use of their marine ecosystem environments, their marine economies. And then, of course, you need the help of big business.”

While the driving force behind treaties like this is the climate crisis and the protection of biodiversity, Ms Medina noted how the geopolitical and commercial aspect has been thrust into the spotlight with the attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by Houthi forces in Yemen. According to data from the German economic institute IfW Kiel, shipping volume through the Red Sea has “collapsed”, falling from around 500,000 containers per day in November 2023 to only around 200,000 as of January 11th. And this conflict has a potential knock-on effect for biodiversity, she added.

“People are becoming more aware of just what a choke point some of these small places can be,” Ms Medina said. “This is still international waters and vital to our economic interests and global security—and, frankly, to the environment. The Red Sea is full of some of the most climate-resilient corals out there because it’s hot, and it’s a little bit more acidic. So its chemistry is closer to what oceans may look like elsewhere in the future. These are corals that are coming through the climate stress that they experience, and their protection and study is vital.”

Also on the panel was Niclas Martensson, chief executive of one of the world’s largest ferry companies, Stena Line. Davos delegates heard that global shipping  accounts for around 3% of CO2 emissions as it moves some 90% of global goods, and Mr Martensson talked about the responsibility he feels to put Stena Line into “the good-guy box”.

“Whether you’re a government, a private company, a mother of two, it’s about the responsibility we all need to take,” he reiterated after the panel.

“We’re quite a big player, at least in Europe, and we often say that if you’re big, you need to be kind as well. In a sense you need to become a trailblazer for the smaller companies that maybe don’t have the same kind of financial muscle to focus on those questions.”

At the moment, the big question for shipping—and for transport the world over—is the future of fuel, he continued. “But there is no silver bullet and all shipping companies are struggling with that right now. However, the high seas will benefit from the knock-on effect of the fuel decisions we are making, because we have to remember that not everything goes up in the air—emissions go down into the sea as well.”

Mr Martensson said that Stena Line has already been making changes to its fleet in the hopes that others will follow, arguing that these transition steps are essential if climate goals are to be met.

“Part of my frustration is that everybody’s talking about the end game of 2050, as if you don’t have to do anything more than pay sustainability taxes until 2049,” he said. “Then suddenly you have to deliver your zero goal. That will not work.

“By 2030 all our ships need to be connected with shore power. That is something we began back in 1989 and it is also a way to push ports to make the kinds of investments needed.”

Stena Line has converted ships, added new technology and made small changes around single-use plastics—with varying results. “We have begun converting existing ships because, from a sustainability perspective, it’s not good to scrap all ships and then build new ones,” explained Mr Martensson. “It took us two years to convert one ship to methanol. And it works. The only problem is that methanol costs 300 times more than the normal fuel.

“We have another ship where we have mounted a battery package that we manoeuvre in the port to reduce sound pollution. We have an AI tool which gives recommendations to our captains as they navigate their ship, and that has reduced our fuel consumption around 3% to 5%. We want to operate another 300 years or more, so it’s important we begin positive trends now, and there is always more we can do.”

Although the treaty took more than a decade to finalise, Ms Medina hopes it will be ratified far more quickly, noting an increasing focus on ocean issues at events like Davos or COP28 in Dubai. Some of the appeal of the treaty is in stemming negatives: Ms Medina pointed to countries that already see fishing fleets encroaching on their territorial waters, “potentially scooping up the benefits of the protection provided inside those domestic waters”. Elsewhere, the appeal is about sharing the huge bounty held in international waters.

“A lot of countries are interested in seeing this agreement come into force for the EIAs, for the benefit-sharing, for the opportunity to use some of the genetic resources that will become publicly available—what we call wet samples—which could lead to all kinds of discoveries”.

There is growing recognition of how the oceans connect the world, how fundamental the seas are for business and the potential behind the blue economy, with the need to both monitor and protect, Ms Medina said.

“We know how vital oceans are and we’ve only just begun to use their resources. We overfished terribly, and we need to fix that. But if we do, fisheries will come back, they’ll regenerate. That’s the wonderful thing about nature.”