For meaningful protection of the forgotten half of our planet, NZ must ensure the world is ambitious when negotiations for the High Seas treaty conclude at the United Nations, writes Helen Clark
As the world struggles to address the global crisis that threatens our human health, increasingly frequent incidents of natural disasters and dire warnings from scientists have forced the global community to consider more seriously the grim forecasts on the health of our planet.
A major scientific report by the United Nations released this year concludes that the global community’s failure to take sufficient action to tackle the climate crisis has resulted in a hotter and more extreme climate for at least the next few decades.
A 2019 report focused on global biodiversity painted a similarly ominous picture: “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever.
"We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
The ocean and planetary health
The ocean plays a pivotal role in regulating our climate and supporting biodiversity—it has absorbed one-third of the carbon dioxide emitted and 93 per cent of the extra heat our greenhouse gas emissions have trapped in the atmosphere.
To put that in perspective, if the ocean had not absorbed that excess heat over the last 65 years, average global temperatures today would be about 15 degrees Celsius warmer than they are.
Scientists tell us that we need to protect at least 30 per cent of the ocean in highly and fully protected marine reserves if we want it to continue to support not only our planetary health, but also our own human health and well-being.
And yet, for the two-thirds of the oceans that lie beyond national jurisdiction, including the high seas, there is no mechanism to create comprehensive marine protected areas, our most effective conservation tool, to help ensure resiliency to this planetary crisis.
A gap in law and foresight has resulted in just one per cent of these areas beyond national jurisdiction being protected.
The forgotten half of the planet
The United Nations has been negotiating a treaty to empower the global community to conserve the high seas, but just as it was poised to conclude negotiations, COVID-19 brought the world to a halt.
Perhaps because these negotiations are so far from our shores, or perhaps because their impact on our daily lives is less direct, the crisis of the oceans has failed to capture the attention of public and media in the way the climate crisis has.
The high seas have so many elements that should make us want to pay attention—many migratory species such as whales, turtles, and seabirds spend most of their lives on the high seas.
A scientific study published this year finds that albatrosses and large petrels spend more of their lives on the high seas than in the land or waters of any single nation. If we as a global community are serious about protecting these incredible animals, we must ensure that we can protect them in the places they call home—the high seas.
In addition to those more familiar ocean creatures, the high seas are also home to species that are found nowhere else on earth, particularly those that live around underwater mounts and sea vents.
Many of the animals that live on the high seas play an important role in mitigating the impacts of climate change. Fish living at the 200-1000m depth known as the Twilight Zone of the ocean take daily vertical migrations—making their way up the water column at night and traveling back to the deeper depths during the day.
The density of these mesopelagic fish is so great that they threw off the measurements of the ocean floor taken by navy researchers in the 1940s.
And these mysterious mesopelagic creatures play an important role in regulating our climate—scientists estimate that it is possible that they help take between 2 and 6 billion metric tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere every year—that’s approximately the amount of carbon emitted by passenger cars globally.
Though we humans have undervalued the importance of the high seas, the broader ocean and planetary ecosystem does depend on them. The current system we have in place for governing the high seas is limited and fragmented—a bit like a complicated 3D puzzle with major pieces missing throughout.
Those responsible for managing high seas resources are mainly focused on their specific sectors, with little thought given to how their actions (or inaction) affect other users or indeed the ocean ecosystem at large.
Without a co-ordinated approach to high seas management, the conservation of its biodiversity has slipped through the cracks.
For example, let us look to a field of hydrothermal vents in the Atlantic Ocean known as the Lost City, so named because the white carbonate spires of underwater mountains that span for city blocks evoke the image of an abandoned metropolis.
But despite its inhospitable environment, the Lost City is home to trillions of microbes. Scientists are still trying to understand how such an extreme environment supports such abundant life.
[This area has been recognised as an area of incredible biological and ecological value by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity and it has been shortlisted as an area of Outstanding Universal Value for the World Heritage Commission.]
And yet, in 2017, the International Seabed Authority granted the Government of Poland a 15-year mining exploration permit.
The potential negative impacts of seabed mining for the ocean and even climate change is so devastating that companies like BMW, Volvo, Google, and Samsung are calling for a moratorium on it.
The high seas’ ability to provide the resources and services upon which we have come to rely is being threatened by our collective failure to protect them.
Hope for our planet – and the high seas
And yet, amid this grim forecast, there is hope – hope and opportunity for humanity to use our considerable collective abilities to start changing the planet for the better.
The United Nations meeting on climate change in Glasgow got major global attention back on those issues, and world leaders will continue to be under pressure to take ambitious action.
But we must carry forward that same attention and pressure on world leaders to other key meetings that will dramatically affect the health of our planet – including at the United Nations in March, when negotiations for the High Seas treaty are poised to conclude, after a two-year Covid-induced delay.
We need that treaty to be ambitious, and to result in meaningful protection of the forgotten half of our planet.
