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Conserving the Great Blue – a new Law of the Sea to protect our oceans Updated for 2026

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In today’s back-to-front world those wanting to safeguard seas and oceans are struggling to do so.

The conservationist has to justify protecting a critical global resource, even though healthy seas sustain us all. Those who empty them, pollute them and profit from them can often do so unchallenged and uncontrolled.

Common sense says it should be the other way around; that all seas and oceans are protected from the outset. We should expect them to be unspoiled and unpolluted. We should assume that marine life is properly valued.

Accountability and responsibility then passes from the defender to the exploiter and the integrity of nature is always put before the importance of profit.

Many marine species are now on the verge of extinction due to commercial fishing, pollution and ocean acidification. Millions of birds and mammals are killed by nets, lines and debris of all kinds. Plastic waste covers hundreds of thousands of square kilometres.

Coral reefs are trashed by fishing gear and weakened by global warming. Mining, oil and fishing companies are making excessive profits whilst impoverishing coastal communities. Industry is getting away with blue murder, and on a vast scale.

A new thinking is needed

The existing system isn’t working because the thinking behind it is flawed. We need to develop a very different perception of the natural world and a true understanding of how we fit into it. Indeed the concept of ‘ocean management’ is absurd.

We cannot ‘manage’ oceans. We cannot ‘manage’ Earth’s chemical and biological systems: they do that unaided and have done so for millions of years. We need only to manage ourselves and our activities in a way that doesn’t diminish nature’s largesse. While the processes of nature, its wildlife and its beauty, are secured as a given.

With the well-being of the sea always coming first, commercial use will then only be possible if it is rational and truly sustainable. Industry will no longer have the right to ransack. Misuse will be a criminal act.

Working together, governments must become accountable to the people they represent, who want clean and vibrant seas. All marine industries will be strictly regulated, compelling them to practice in ways that are neither harmful nor unsustainable.

Damaging land-based activities must also be addressed, such as excessive fossil fuel emissions and the proliferation of plastic waste. Over-fishing and destructive mining will become a thing of the past; pollution and plastic waste will diminish and eventually disappear; wildlife will flourish – in coastal waters, ocean depths and on the high seas.

The sea will provide employment for millions of people and yield a never-ending supply of food and renewable resources.

These principles are already enshrined in law

Does that sound unrealistic? Too idealistic? It shouldn’t. Not when you realize that the world’s seas and oceans are already protected by international law; by treaty law and by customary law.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (which 178 states have signed and 166 have ratified) obliges nations to co-operate on a global basis to protect the marine environment and to prevent, reduce and control pollution.

It also stipulates the preservation of rare or fragile ecosystems as well as the habitats of depleted, threatened or endangered species and other forms of marine life.

Also relevant is the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which covers the conservation of all ecosystems and species using the precautionary approach – giving nature the benefit of the doubt when there is sketchy scientific data.

There is also the Public Trust Doctrine – the principle dating back to the Roman Emperor Justinian that certain resources are preserved for public use, and that the government is required to maintain them for the public’s reasonable use.

Thus it requires governments to manage natural resources solely in the best interests of present and future citizens – including the global commons, meaning areas and resources beyond national jurisdiction, such as the high seas and atmosphere.

Its key principles are wise resource management, government accountability and responsibility to future generations, and these provide a clear-cut legal basis for conserving marine environments and the rest of the natural world.

Also applicable is the Common Heritage of Mankind principle, which asserts that the commons should not be exploited by individual nations or corporations but held in trust for the benefit of all and for future generations.

Indeed it has specific application to the high seas. Article 136 of the UNCLOS Treaty explicitly declares the “seabed and ocean floor and subsoil thereof, beyond the limits of national jurisdiction” to be the “Common Heritage of Mankind”.

So what’s the problem?

Firstly, the Law of the Sea needs to be modernized. It came into force in 1994 and was drawn up over 12 years before that. There have been many technological and environmental developments since then which are not accounted for in the treaty, such as the ease with which vessels can now track and capture fish. Big issues like ocean acidification and the great Pacific garbage patch were unknown at the time.

Most importantly though, protective legislation; the Law of the Sea, the CBD, the Public Trust Doctrine and the Common Heritage of Humankind principle are not properly enforced, and in many areas – notably the high seas – they are rarely enforced at all.

And yet today’s technology makes law enforcement possible across the globe. With GPS and vessel monitoring systems, ships can be under surveillance everywhere.

Other actions to combat over-fishing will include a massive reduction in global fishing capacity in line with stocks, revoking the licenses of vessels fishing unsustainably, and preventing illegally caught fish from entering the market.

Enforcement can be financed by revenue from responsibly managed activities such as mining and fishing, from individual nation’s contributions based on GDP, and from benevolent subsidies.

Reform is necessary, urgent – and achievable!

The way in which humankind despoils our watery world is depressing indeed. And even more depressing is the failure of governments to react. Those who we elect, who we empower and we pay for, are failing us and they are failing the natural world.

They are allowing the cruel and unnecessary slaughter of millions of sea creatures and the ruin of undersea habitats. Some governments are making the problem even worse by subsidizing unviable and damaging commercial fishing.

Now let’s imagine a different scenario – that we take the dominant paradigm of over-exploitation and turn it completely around, so that respect for the sea and its wildlife becomes the norm, not the exception.

Marine governance can be transformed so that seas and oceans are valued as they should be. When governments co-operate they can deliver the big picture legislation so urgently needed to bring our attitude out of the Dark Ages and into the 21st century.

With the urgent reform of the UN Law of the Sea, the entire marine environment becomes protected as a universal principle rooted in law, upheld by all nations as a shared heritage. Seas and oceans will be unpolluted, with clear waters, teeming with life, for good.

The concept is simple. It is logical. It is achievable. The legal framework for it is already largely in place. And as with many of society’s steps forward, it is essentially about ending what is wrong and replacing it with what is right.

We invite you to help bring this proposal to fruition!

 

 

Action: The first step is to create a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) specifically for oceans. Pledge your support and the Terramar Project will automatically send a message to the UN urging them to properly protect seas and oceans.

More information: Read Conserving the Great Blue (PDF file) and browse the Marinet website.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘UN talks begin on a new law to save our oceans‘.

Deborah Wright has worked with Marinet since 2009. Her publication The Ocean Planet reviews the serious challenges which our seas and oceans now face and outlines proposals for fundamental changes in marine management to solve this crisis using an ecosystem-based approach.

 




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UN talks begin on a new law to save our oceans Updated for 2026

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The United Nations has resolved to modernise international law on the sustainable use of the high seas and their wildlife.

The move could lead to new laws to address many of the oceans most severe problems, including measures to combat over-fishing and illegal fishing, the regulation of ‘by catch’ by fishing vessels, and the conservation of endangered species.

Other issues on the agenda include the protection of the seabed from deep sea mining, ocean acidification from rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, marine biodiversity prospecting, regulation of offshore oil and gas prospecting, and the clean up of vast floating islands of plastic waste.

Following the decision by the United Nations Informal Working Group on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), negotiations will now begin for a new international agreement for the sustainable use and conservation of marine biodiversity in the high seas.

Encouraging and historic

The decision was welcomed by David Miliband, Co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission (GOC), who had himself addressed delegates at the BBNJ meeting. It was “encouraging to see the UN agreeing to take action”, he said.

“This was one of the main demands identified by the Global Ocean Commission. I’m glad the message is getting across. The consensus reached last week will be remembered as a milestone in the modernisation of ocean governance.”

GOC Commissioner Robert Hill, who was the first Chairperson of the BBNJ when it was formed in 2006, called last week’s decision “historic”, adding:

“As always with UN processes, the work is far from over. First, we have to ensure the consensus recommendation is not undermined when it goes before the General Assembly in a few months and, second, it will be important to monitor closely the treaty negotiation – including the Preparatory Committee process and ultimately the international conference.”

Last year the GOC called for a new Implementing Agreement under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to prioritise ocean health and resilience, restore ocean productivity, guard against irresponsible, inefficient and wasteful exploitation, and allow for the creation of high seas marine protected areas (MPAs).

Such an agreement would extend governance to the 64% of the global ocean – and 45% of the planetary surface – that lies outside national jurisdiction, and provide a mechanism to conserve valuable high seas services such as carbon sequestration, worth between US$74 and US$222 billion annually, currently in jeopardy.

Time to end the high seas ‘failed state’

“The high seas are like a failed state“ , said Miliband. “Poor governance and the absence of policing and management mean valuable resources are unprotected or being squandered. The high seas belong to us all. We know what needs to be done but we can’t do it alone. A joint mission must be our priority.”

The GOC’s call was relayed and supported by more than 285,000 citizens from 111 countries, who signed a petition that was delivered to the UN Secretary General at the opening of the current Session of the UN General Assembly in September last year.

The BBNJ was mandated by the Rio+20 2012 Earth Summit to address the governance and conservation of the high seas – the portion of the ocean beyond a country’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. These areas beyond national jurisdiction represent 64% of the ocean’s surface, and 45% of our entire planet.

 

 

Join the call: ‘Help secure a living ocean, food and prosperity – propose a new agreement for high seas protection‘.

 

 




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Ice sheets will be melting, and raising seas, for centuries to come Updated for 2026

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Ice sheets respond slowly to changes in climate, because they are so massive that they themselves dominate the climate conditions over and around them.

But once they start flowing faster towards the shore and melting into the ocean the process takes centuries to reverse. Ice sheets are nature’s freight trains: tough to start moving, even harder to stop.

We know this process has been going back and forth throughout history – it’s why we’ve had ice ages and warm periods. But until now we haven’t known exactly how quickly ice sheets retreated and reformed.

New research published in the journal Nature Communications gives us an answer, and it isn’t great news.

It turns out sea levels often rose at scary rates in response to natural climate changes, long before mankind began pumping carbon into the atmosphere.

In the short-term sea level is affected by ocean warming and so-called ‘thermal expansion‘, or melting glaciers based on land. These changes can occur quickly – within a decade – but their impact on sea level is relatively small, in the tens of centimetres.

Collapsing ice sheets can cause big sea level rises

The drivers of longer-term sea level rise, over decades or centuries, are the continental ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

On the fringes of these ice sheets are ‘ice shelves’ stretching far out into the ocean. Ice shelves can be hundreds of meters thick and, because 90% of ice in water floats below the surface, they remain ‘grounded’ on the sea floor as long as the sea is less deep than 90% of the ice shelf thickness.

Where the sea floor is deeper or the ice shelf gets thinner, there will be an area of floating land ice; here, warming ocean water can get underneath and melt the ice. Once sufficiently destabilised, an ice shelf can break up catastrophically.

Such an ice shelf collapse takes the brakes off the ice stream that feeds into the ice shelf, and land ice starts to flow much quicker towards the ocean.

Ice flow is a relatively slow process, and it takes some forcing to get a major ice sheet to systematically respond (like trying to set a fully loaded freight train into motion). Once moving, however, it will be equally hard to arrest that movement (like trying to stop a moving, fully loaded freight train).

Still, we cannot ignore it, because the sheer volume of land ice on Earth is enormous – equivalent to more than 65m of global sea level rise; Greenland alone accounts for 6 to 7m, West Antarctica for some 5-6m, and East Antarctica for the remainder. These melting ice sheets will dominate major sea level changes for centuries to come.

Diving into deep-sea data

We can learn something about what to expect by examining sea level changes during the past five ice-age cycles (past half million years), especially through comparing them with the total amount of ice on the planet at the time.

During a peak ice age, Earth held almost three times as much land ice as it holds today. For instance, during the most recent ice age the ice sheet over North America was 10-20% larger than the one we see today over all of Antarctica.

During warm periods in between ice ages the sea was often close to its present level but occasionally reached up to 8 or 9m above today’s shoreline – the equivalent of melting 1.3 Greenlands today.

To get a sense of how quickly the sea went up and down, we need highly detailed and well-dated records. Over the past decade I’ve led a team of scientists at the University of Southampton and the Australian National University who have developed such records using data from the Red Sea.

The Red Sea has a very shallow and narrow connection with the open Indian Ocean. It also evaporates quickly – the equivalent of 2m of water each year – so new water must constantly flow in to top up sea levels and to avoid it getting too salty.

But such inflow is restricted by the tiny gap between Djibouti and Yemen, and in the past that connection was even smaller. As a result, the Red Sea was much saltier during previous ice ages, when sea level stood more than 100m below the present.

Using microfossils from drill cores from the sea floor we can measure salinity through time and translate this to sea level changes in the Red Sea connection with the Indian Ocean. We were able to assess timings more accurately by comparing these sea level records to climate records from caves, which can be precisely dated by looking at radioactive decay in uranium.

Sea level rise by the metre

So now we had a detailed sea level record, with a well-defined timescale. Finally, we could work out rates of past sea level changes, and compare changing sea levels with well-dated reconstructions of temperature and CO2 changes (from ice cores).

This allowed us to assess the speed of some 120 sea level rises in the past. Previously, this was possible only for one recent event. Now, for the first time, we had the information to look at how sea levels responded to natural climate change.

It appears the sea level could rise as quickly as 5.5m per century. However this only happened at the abrupt endings of ice ages, starting with about three times the modern ice volume. When starting with double the modern ice volume or less, sea levels did not rise faster than 2m per century. When global ice volume was similar to the present, the sea typically rose less than 1 to 1.5m per century.

So it seems the fastest losses of ice occur when there is more ice. Not much of a surprise, perhaps, but now at least we have some real numbers to say how fast, and how much ice.

And the speed the sea can rise during periods with modern ice volumes is still worrying – a 1m rise this century would hugely affect millions of people. Given that Earth has achieved these rates even when warming was much slower than today, such a rise is very possible.

How long will it take?

In the 120 different events we looked at, ice sheets went from initial change to maximum retreat within 400 years 68% of the time, and within 1,100 years for 95%. In other words: once triggered, ice sheet reduction (and therefore sea level rise) kept accelerating relentlessly for many centuries.

Research we carried out previously found that modern sea level rise seems to be conforming to what we would expect from (high end) natural responses to warming.

That is: after 150 years of increasing (man made) warming, the ice sheets would only recently be reaching the point where they start making a noticeable contribution to sea level rise.

But that time has come and, once ice sheets start to melt, the freight train is in motion. It will then keep moving for many centuries to come, no matter how hard we stamp on the brakes.

 

 

Eelco Rohling is Professor of Ocean and Climate Change at the University of Southampton. He receives funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council, and from the Australian Research Council.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




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We must protect our seas! Updated for 2026

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I’ve just completed the first long-distance swim in the seven Seas of the ancient world. I’ve experienced some things I will never forget. And seen some things I wish I could erase from my memory, but which will haunt me for the rest of my days.

I will never forget the people I met along this journey, the literally hundreds of people from all walks of life who helped us and supported us and jumped in the sea to swim with us, just to be part of this mission, just for their love of the sea.

And then there are the things I would rather forget. Such as the sea floor under me as I swam the Aegean, which was covered with litter. I saw tyres and plastic bags, bottles, cans, shoes and clothing – but absolutely nothing that qualifies as ‘sea life’.

Turtles and jellyfish – but where were the sharks?

In the Arabian Sea I swam through vast shoals of turtles, which was spectacular. They do belong there. But so do many, many other fish species, and those were nowhere to be seen.

I never saw any fish bigger than the size of my hand, in any of the seven Seas. The larger ones had all been fished out.

The Black Sea was full of jellyfish. This is not a good thing, because they don’t belong there – they were brought in with the ballast on visiting ships and wrought havoc on an ecosystem that was already unbalanced.

In the entire four weeks I did not see one shark, anywhere.

As I was about to jump in the water for the Red Sea swim I asked the boat’s skipper whether I should keep a look out for sharks. He told me not to worry, because the sharks have all been fished out. That’s exactly what does worry me. A healthy ocean is an ocean with sharks.

Suddenly, the Red Sea came to life

But I did see something astonishing in the Red Sea. It was when I swam through a Marine Protected Area, and experienced a sea as it was meant to be: rich and colourful, teaming with abundant life.

And then, just two kilometres on, outside of the protected area, the picture changed again. There was no coral and there were no fish. It looked like an underwater desert.

If I had needed more proof that Marine Protected Areas really work, that was it. Everything I knew about how MPAs allow marine life to recover, how they protect and restore fish stocks, how they provide income-generating livelihoods for local people, how they boost ecotourism and ensure long-term sustainability, was all there in front of me.

Many of the people I met along the way have experienced it too. They have seen their seas changing. They know that there is a serious problem. And they have seen that the problem is reversible, IF we take urgent action and create Marine Protected Areas.

Thinking ahead

There’s a reason we ended our final North Sea swim at the Thames Barrier. It’s a highly symbolic example of foresight and visionary design. When it was built 30 years ago, its engineers had no idea how crucial it would be. They thought it would be used two or three times a year.

But this last winter it was used 48 times. Where would London be today without the Thames Barrier? In a word: underwater.

I don’t want to imagine what the world will be like in 30 years time if we don’t protect our marine resources today.

The world’s waters are changing. The seas and oceans are in a state of crisis. And we rely on these seas and oceans – all of us on this planet, wherever we live – for our very livelihood.

I am well aware that the world is caught up in a number of serious global political and humanitarian crises right now. It is certainly not my intention to trivialise any of these. But in focusing solely on the current state of global hyper-conflict, we run the risk of losing sight of something that is going to affect our children and grandchildren.

Protecting resources fosters peace

The biggest risk the world faces right now is what is being done to the environment, and a large part of that is what’s happening in our seas.

When Desmond Tutu came to wish me well at the outset of this expedition, he reminded me of something fundamental. He reminded me that so many of the world’s conflicts are over resources. When we fail to protect our resources, we set the stage for conflict. But when we protect our resources, we foster peace.

I dream of a peaceful world of well-managed Marine Protected Areas, protecting our coastlines and extending across our high seas. Of abundant oceans teeming with fish, big and small, with turtles and whales and sea-birds. Oceans filled with sharks.

Now is the time to make that dream happen. To reverse the rampant devastation of our marine resources, to provide them safe havens that allow them to regroup and recover.  Too many species are dying out, hunted to near extinction, slipping through our fingers, like sand.

Let’s stop fighting. And start giving our seas a fighting chance.

 

 

Lewis Pugh is an ocean advocate and a pioneer swimmer. In 2010 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and in 2013 he was appointed Patron of the Oceans by the United Nations Environment Programme. http://lewispugh.com

This article was originally published on Lewis’s blog.

 




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