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Donald Trump’s interest in deep-sea mining emerged with awkward timing for the organisers of this month’s UN Ocean Conference in the French coastal city of Nice.
In late April the US president signed an executive order asserting Washington’s right to award licences for mining on the seabed in international waters. The move drew angry criticism from nations including China, which suggested the US was seeking to “bypass . . . international law”, and from green groups who accused it of threatening maritime ecosystems.
Trump’s plans would set “a dangerous precedent that could destabilise the entire system of global ocean governance”, warned Leticia Reis de Carvalho, secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority, in a statement.
The tensions have cast a shadow over the build-up to the conference, where representatives of nearly 200 UN member states will seek to reach consensus around ocean protection. But long before Trump’s intervention, progress in this field had been painfully slow — even by the troubled standards of international environmental co-operation.
In 2015, UN members committed to 17 “sustainable development goals” to be achieved by 2030, including effective conservation and sustainable use of the seas and oceans. Over the following decade — and particularly in the past few years — nations have struggled to reach agreement on the key elements of that push, while the maritime environment has continued to degrade.
One target for the French and Costa Rican organisers of the Nice conference is to secure global implementation of the UN High Seas Treaty, which was agreed in 2023 but has not yet entered into force because too few countries have ratified it.
The treaty — which sets down rules for the two-thirds of the world’s oceans that are outside any nation’s control — is a landmark development in the management of the global commons. It would put 30 per cent of international waters under protection by 2030 — up from about 1.5 per cent today, according to the Protected Planet database. Among other elements, the treaty requires official impact assessments for any activities on the high seas that could affect the environment, and creates a legal framework for the creation of large-scale protected areas.
Yet the slowness of most nations to ratify the treaty highlights the lack of urgency with which many have approached these issues — despite growing warnings from scientists.
“Multiple indicators are going in a very concerning direction,” says Karina von Schuckmann, a physical oceanographer at research group Mercator Ocean International. “We have to use this evidence base to take well-informed actions.”
The global sea surface temperature has reached record highs, with damaging effects for many species. Increasing acidification, as the sea absorbs more carbon dioxide, is also having an impact. A growing number of studies show that the majority of fish in some regions now contain microplastics, with roughly 20mn tonnes of plastic entering aquatic ecosystems every year according to the UN Environment Programme.
Yet a conference in South Korea last December ended without a deal on a global plastics treaty. The EU, UK and many developing nations had pushed for limits on primary plastic production, while oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia demanded a stronger focus on recycling and waste management.
There has been a similar story on fishing. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, one-third of global fish populations are overfished, meaning that they are being caught and killed more quickly than they can reproduce. In 2022, nations provisionally agreed at the World Trade Organization on a basic framework to crack down on illegal fishing and “harmful” fishery subsidies — but again, most have not ratified it, and a second more comprehensive set of rules remains on the drawing board. One sticking point has been concerns from India that the framework does not take enough account of the needs of developing countries.
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“Fishing is the number one factor for the destruction of the ocean, and that is not being addressed,” says Claire Nouvian, founder of the ocean conservation organisation Bloom, warning that large parts of the sea could be reduced to “a void for jellyfish and bacteria”.
Still, the oceans stand to benefit from wider UN talks on nature protection. Last October’s biodiversity-focused COP16 summit in Colombia ended without an agreement on a new framework for financing of nature conservation — but developing-nation governments still plan to push for rich-world counterparts to make good on existing commitments. In 2022, nations agreed at the previous biodiversity COP to increase total funding for nature protection and restoration to $200bn per year by 2030, of which $30bn would be provided by wealthy nations for poorer ones.
So far, the oceans have received a relatively small share of total environmental spending: about $3.3bn per year, according to research by the Our Shared Seas project. But new financial approaches are starting to help boost investment. Blue bonds — with the proceeds typically used for ocean protection — have been issued in recent years by nations including Indonesia and Barbados, and by companies such as Danish offshore wind company Ørsted. Multilateral financial institutions have also showed an increased focus on this field — including the World Bank, which has mobilised $182mn for projects in over 100 countries.
In Nice, further expansion of finance will be high on the agenda. A key question, however, will be how far the new tensions over deep-sea mining rights will undermine co-operation on ocean protection. A draft agreement for the meeting drew condemnation from green groups, who called it weak on deep-sea mining and plastic pollution.
“Instead of taking bold, unified action to protect our ocean, we’re seeing dangerous backpedalling,” said John Hocevar, a campaign director at Greenpeace USA in response to the draft.
In a statement last month, Peter Thomson, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for the ocean, urged nations to reaffirm their commitment to “multilateralism and the observance of international law”.
“Our management of the ocean must be as interconnected as the ocean itself,” he wrote.