Can we protect and profit from the oceans?

Joe Gough for Vox

What the UN is missing with its plan to save the seas

The ocean is home to most animal life on Earth. It’s also vital to human survival, regulating the climate, capturing 90 percent of the heat caused by carbon emissions, and producing 50 percent of the Earth’s oxygen. But most of the ocean is poorly regulated, amounting to a free-for-all of resource extraction — from commercial fishing to drilling for oil — that severely damages the marine ecosystems we all depend on.

Now, world governments are inching closer to the most decisive step ever to safeguard the ocean’s future. The United Nations High Seas Treaty, which was drafted last March and will take effect once 60 countries ratify it, aims to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. It particularly focuses on the part of the ocean that is currently least protected, the high seas, which make up about two-thirds of the ocean and are defined as any area beyond 200 nautical miles off of a country’s coast.

The treaty intends to create “marine protected areas,” or MPAs, a legal designation that would regulate and limit the kinds of extractive activities that can happen within the high seas. Once ratified, participating governments would designate MPAs — ideally prioritizing protecting areas rich in biodiversity — and compliance would be monitored by a central body formed under the treaty.

Yet MPAs are also highly limited. Though they sound like a kind of Yellowstone in the sea, they can perhaps be better thought of as “protected in name only,” as Vox’s Benji Jones put it last year, because commercial fishing, oil drilling, and mining will still happen in these areas. Instead, MPA regulations hope to prevent the worst injustices against humans and animals, while the revenue generated from permitted activities — which could range from recreational diving and fisheries to mining and drilling — would then partially pay the management fees for these zones.

Another major goal of the UN High Seas Treaty is promoting the equitable sharing of ocean resources, such as new genetic discoveries that can help advance medicine, between high- and low-income countries. It also aims to create a more regulated ocean economy, with some nations able to pay off national debt if they agree to protect certain areas.

Some management is better than the usual way of doing business in the high seas — a lawless place where nations do not have jurisdiction, horrors like slavery on industrial fishing vessels are common, and ocean trawlers catch and often kill billions of pounds of bycatch (unintentionally captured creatures like dolphins, whales, and turtles) every year.

A deeper look, however, into the proposed management in Marine Protected Areas complicates its image as a conservation solution. The crux of it all is the trade-off between making a profit and fully protecting the ocean. We can’t have both.

There’s a lot of money to be made in exploiting the ocean in the short term. But thinking solely of short-term profit will cost us more down the line, even in purely economic terms. The ocean economy — encompassing industries like fishing, maritime shipping, and oil drilling — generates nearly $3 trillion of global GDP every year, and its worth is estimated at $24 trillion. Its stability depends on making conservation a priority now, rather than extracting more from the ocean than it can bear.

The High Seas Treaty’s 30 percent target for turning the ocean into protected areas is just a starting point if we want to conserve oceans and the future of life on Earth. But proposed regulation needs teeth. Figuring out what activities should and should not be allowed in MPAs is a broad and tough conversation about what we think the true value of the ocean is.

What is a marine protected area?

The concept of a marine protected area goes back centuries. “Taboo,” or tabu, as historically practiced in the Pacific Islands, has contemporary resonance as a conservation strategy. To this day, it keeps certain areas of the ocean off-limits to fishing.

MPAs, as we think of them today, have been in the global conversation since at least 1962, when the limits of the ocean’s resources were discussed at the World Congress on National Parks, the international forum for creating protected natural areas. Then, at the UN’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders agreed on a target to turn 10 percent of the ocean into MPAs by 2020, but this goal was not met. Today, just 2.9 percent of the ocean is fully or highly protected from fishing impacts.

A shuffle of different targets and conversations then ensued, culminating in the 30 percent by 2030 goal set by the UN High Seas Treaty last year. Even that ambitious target represents the bare minimum needed to adequately protect the ocean, experts told me, and the agreement may take years to come into force. That’s time we do not have.

Jenna Sullivan-Stack et al | Frontiers in Marine Science

The size and scope of MPAs can vary widely: The largest is in the Ross Sea region near Antarctica, where 1.12 million square kilometers have been protected since 2016. The smallest MPA is Echo Bay Marine Provincial Park in Gilford Island, between Vancouver Island and British Columbia, which has just 1 acre of protection.

The UN High Seas treaty, for the first time, sets out a process for states to set up marine protected areas in the high seas, outside of any nation’s direct jurisdiction. In their proposals, states must show what area they intend to protect, the threats it faces, and plans for its management. In exchange, countries could create a range of economic benefits from the ocean, like debt restructuring (as was the case with the Seychelles), benefiting fisheries, and even selling blue carbon credits.

Beyond marine protected areas, the High Seas Treaty lays out a framework for the use of marine genetic resources and what fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from discovery would look like. Currently, developed nations are far outpacing developing nations in finding and commercializing marine genetic resources, such as the anti-cancer drug Halaven, which is derived from a Japanese sea sponge and has annual sales of $300 million.

There’s still a lively debate in ocean politics over whether an MPA should fully protect a region of the ocean, or whether it can also be used for commercial purposes like fishing, mining, and oil extraction. Critics of the MPA approach go so far as to call them “paper parks” (or parks in name only) because, as they exist now, they allow a number of exploitative activities within protected areas.

Groups like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s premier conservation organization, have proposed supplementary guidelines for MPAs that would ban extractive activities, especially at industrial scales. The UN High Seas Treaty as it stands now does not limit what existing fisheries, cargo ships, and deep-sea mining organizations can do in open waters.

“We need to remove perverse incentives, and we need to rewire the world in a different way,” said Dan Laffoley, an ocean conservationist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The IUCN also advocates for an ecosystem-wide approach to conserving the ocean rather than single species protections, and for protecting species as they migrate across the ocean over time, rather than solely in one static location. Additionally, IUCN guidelines point to the fluctuating nature of the ocean and its inhabitants that travel across large distances; because of this, they suggest that there should be temporal protections in migratory paths and spawning locations.

The IUCN guidelines also call for greater protection of the entire water column, from the top to the bottom of the seafloor. The UN High Seas Treaty, on the other hand, would exempt deep-sea mining operators from submitting environmental impact assessments on their proposed activities on the ocean floor.

Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images

These black polymetallic sea nodules form naturally in the deep sea.

There’s something fishy about extracting buckets of money from the ocean in order to save it

Getting world leaders to agree to these terms is the challenge. Scientists and activists want full protection of the oceans now, while business interests argue that there’s too much money to be made by continuing extractive activities.

The challenge for ocean advocates is to create economic incentives for conservation that can outweigh the enormous incentive to continue to allow business-as-usual pollution and exploitation of marine ecosystems. “Giving a different value to nature is one of our biggest challenges,” said marine biologist and explorer Sylvia Earle in a panel at the UN World Oceans Day conference last June. “Our continued existence — that needs to be on the balance sheet.”

This conversation plugs into a long-running debate over whether economic incentives and market forces can promote effective stewardship of nature. The 1970s saw the emergence of the idea of “ecosystem services”: the benefits we get from functioning ecosystems. It started as a way for biologists to highlight the life support systems that keep the Earth habitable, but ecosystem services later started to be used by economists to create analyses of the monetary value of ecosystems.

While these monetary valuations could be used in conservation advocacy by translating the benefits of ecosystems into the dollars-and-cents language of policy, they’re inherently incomplete and reductive. Critics of putting a price on nature have argued that this approach would put financial incentives before sound ecological measures.

Environmental journalist George Monbiot has written that treating nature and its benefits as “ecosystem services” that can be paid for will make them seem fungible and make it easy for companies to destroy ecosystems by claiming they can build technological replacements that can do the same thing. And, by expressing the value of nature only in economic terms, the ecosystem services framework could consolidate decision-making power in the hands of those who have money. When it comes to conservation, practicality can be the cloak under which cynicism hides.

We’re still in the early stages of knowing whether financial approaches to conservation can align with the well-being of oceans. There are some promising case studies: Following the example set by the Seychelles, for example, could let countries restructure their debt into protection of the ocean by creating MPAs.

In 2015, the Seychelles sold $22 million of its debt to the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit, in exchange for protecting its oceans by creating 13 marine protected areas across 30 percent of its national waters. The country has banned or restricted fishing, development, and oil exploration in these zones — regulations that are enforced with steep penalties, including imprisonment.

The risks outweigh the rewards when the bait for conservation is money

The High Seas Treaty’s vision of conserving 30 percent of global oceans would allocate more protection for marine ecosystems than the world has ever seen, but it has to be approached thoughtfully, conservationists say. Tessa Hempson — chief scientist at Mission Blue, a global coalition founded by Earle to support a network of global MPAs — thought of the questions we should first be asking.

“Are we targeting the really essential areas that we need to be focusing on?” Hempson told Vox. “Do we know enough to make sure that we are targeting those areas correctly? And then also, you know, it’s all good and well having those areas demarcated on a map, but are they actually effectively conserved?”

It’s not the first time these tensions (and their corollary benefits and consequences) have been highlighted. The idea of a “blue economy” first emerged at a 2012 UN conference, aiming to bridge the gap between conservation and treating marine ecosystems as a fungible asset. At the time, Pacific Island nations saw how the ocean could be their gateway to be included in global “green” development by highlighting the importance of the ocean and coasts to their livelihoods, culture, and economy. The blue economy, in turn, would help bolster equitable sharing of benefits between developed and developing countries.

In the years that followed, the agenda of equity fell through the cracks. Framing of the blue economy turned to prioritizing growth and promoting “decoupling” — an idea that the economy can keep growing without consequences to the environment. Decoupling separates nature and economy in an intellectualized way in which the effects of capitalism and consumption can continue undeterred.

Though the concept of the blue economy began with intentions of global equity and fair distribution of benefits from the use of ocean resources, we’ve landed in a wayward place where endless growth models don’t truly respect the limits of nature. The ocean stands to be mined for all it is worth unless MPAs start to guarantee meaningful protection.

The high seas were long held as global commons; expressions like “plenty of fish in the sea” reflected the impression that the ocean held infinite resources for the taking. Now, it’s clearer than ever that this model won’t work anymore.

If overfishing continues, we can expect a global collapse of all species currently fished by 2050 — though the lead author of the study, Boris Worm, wrote in 2021 that putting forth ocean protections could give us reason for hope. In any case, the collapse of fish stocks will have ecosystem-wide consequences, like the mass extinction of large ocean creatures, sharks, whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals.

Another major threat to the ocean looms on the horizon: mining. Deep-sea mining is not yet occurring on an industrial scale, but it’s a major issue of discussion in the marine space because of its implications for the global renewable energy transition. Firms are hoping to mine the ocean bed in search of polymetallic nodules containing cobalt and nickel for use in renewable car batteries. Last year, the International Seabed Authority, the body that regulates the ocean floor, postponed a decision on whether to start allowing mining, citing the need for more time to understand what science-backed guidelines should be in place before moving forward.

But many believe it’s only a matter of time before companies are granted licenses to begin mining the ocean floor — unleashing a drilling bonanza that could have consequences we don’t yet understand because the deep ocean has barely been explored.

Arguably, the only thing we should be extracting from the ocean is knowledge. Indeed, the knowledge we have of the ocean pales in comparison to the knowledge we have of outer space, with funding for space exploration exceeding that of ocean exploration more than 150-fold.

People have been debating for a long time whether greed will be the end of humanity, or whether financial incentives can be used to create protections. When it comes to the oceans, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

As Sylvia Earle said at the June UN conference, “The most important thing we take from the oceans is our existence. If you like to breathe, you’ll listen up.”