The largest ecosystem on the planet. The biggest carbon sink on Earth. Over half the surface of the planet. The global ocean, made up of international waters beyond national control, are vast and home to great magnitudes of ocean life.

These blue expanses act as highways for whales, turtles and tuna travelling thousands of miles. They are the home of enigmatic creatures and wildlife that can live for hundreds of years. Yet these global oceans are effectively a wild west. Current ocean law tends to focus more on preserving the right to exploit international waters than on protecting them. Governments have created a plethora of sectoral and regional bodies under the Law of the Sea to cover specific human activities on parts of the high seas, such as the International Seabed Authority covering deep sea mining, or Regional Fisheries Management Organisations that look at fishing activity in certain regions. Yet governments have so far failed to create a place for the international community to comprehensively manage the cumulative impacts and cross-cutting threats to marine life and ecosystems in the global oceans.

The result? A fragmented system with little mandate or expertise to protect our global oceans from the barrage of threats facing them in the 21st century. Clearly the status quo is not working to safeguard the health of our oceans: 93% percent of fish populations are now fully fished or overfished in the oceans overall, and the multiple stressors hitting the oceans risk undermining marine life’s capacity to absorb and store carbon, helping to limit the climate emergency. Less than 1% of the global oceans are protected as ocean sanctuaries. Yet science compels us to place at least a third of the world’s oceans over the next decade off-limits to the extractive industries seeking to fish, drill and mine the oceans on an industrial scale.

The question now facing governments is how to translate these diverse, complex and mammoth threats to the global ocean into a new international agreement: a Global Ocean Treaty, formally referred to as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty (BBNJ). Preparatory discussions about the need for this treaty have lasted over a decade, with governments beginning to negotiate in earnest in September 2018. After three rounds of talks, and one session remaining in spring 2020, we now have a draft treaty text. So how does it measure up?