Ocean Treaty: historic agreement reached after ten years of negotiations
The countries have reached a historic agreement on the protection of the oceans after 10 years of negotiations. The High Seas Treaty aims to make 30% of the seas protected areas for the protection and restoration of marine nature by 2030.
The agreement was reached on Saturday evening, after 38 hours of negotiations, at the UN headquarters in New York, BBC News reports.
Negotiations dragged on for years due to disagreements over funding and fishing rights. The last international agreement on ocean protection was signed 40 years ago in 1982 – the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
This agreement established an area called the high seas — international waters where all countries have the right to fish, send ships and conduct research — but only 1.2% of these waters are protected.
Marine life outside these protected areas is at risk due to climate change, overfishing and shipping. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, according to the latest assessment of the world's marine species, almost 10% of them are endangered.
These new protected areas established in the treaty will impose restrictions on fishing, shipping routes and exploration activities, such as deep-sea mining, from 200 meters or more from the surface.
Any future activity on the deep seabed will be subject to strict environmental regulations and supervision to ensure that it is carried out responsibly.
The main issue is the joint use of marine genetic resources — this is the biological material of plants and animals in the ocean, which can benefit society, including in pharmaceuticals (for example, sea sponges have given key ingredients for cancer treatment), industry and food production.
Richer countries currently have the resources and funding to explore the depths of the ocean, but poorer countries would like any benefits they find to be shared equally.
Dr Robert Blasiak, an ocean researcher at Stockholm University, said the problem is that no one knows how much ocean resources are worth and therefore how they can be divided.
"If you imagine a large widescreen high-definition TV, and if only three or four pixels on this giant screen work, then this is our knowledge of the depths of the ocean. We have recorded about 230,000 species in the ocean, but it is estimated that there are more than two million of them," BBC News quoted him as saying.
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