By Mary Kate McCoy
June 13, 2024
Experts: To protect high seas, take heed of climate change
4 min
The headlines are grim — but there is hope on the horizon.
“Put bluntly, the high seas treaty will not succeed if it doesn’t account for climate change,” said Conservation International climate scientist Lee Hannah, the article’s lead author. “Our window of opportunity is closing, but we still have time to get this right if we move swiftly.”
“Protecting biodiversity in the high seas in the face of climate change is an ongoing chess game,” Hannah said. “We have models to predict where species are moving, and we must act on them. But we must also be prepared for the unexpected impacts climate change will bring.”
Climate change is shifting tuna populations east into the high seas.
The high seas are essentially no-man’s land — no single country has jurisdiction over them, which makes protecting the high seas from overfishing, mining and pollution all the more difficult.
As it stands, the high seas treaty creates a legal framework to establish marine protected areas in waters outside of countries’ jurisdictions. Advocates hope the treaty will take effect sometime in the next year. In the meantime, Hannah says countries, regional fishery authorities and international scientific organizations involved in the treaty must plan for the unprecedented changes oceans are facing.
And the clock is ticking: Nearly every country on Earth has agreed to protect 30 percent of Earth’s lands and seas by 2030 (an effort known as “30 by 30”), but that will be impossible without the high seas, said Isaac Brito, a Conservation International marine scientist and co-author of the commentary.
“If we try to reach ‘30 by 30’ by only protecting individual countries’ jurisdictional waters, we would have to protect more than 60 percent of those waters globally — which would limit activities like fishing and mining in more than half of the marine territory of each country,” he said. “No country will ever sign that.”
The high seas are critical for migratory species like sea turtles.
Ultimately, the conservation plans we create in the high seas need to reflect how species’ migratory, breeding and feeding habitats are shifting in the face of climate change, Hannah said.
“We have a complex task ahead of us,” he said. “It is urgent that we get started now.”
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