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The global High Seas Treaty, decades in the making, will become international law. It aims to create vast maritime conservation areas.
Sept. 19, 2025, 3:54 p.m. ET
The high seas, the vast waters beyond any one country’s jurisdiction, cover nearly half the planet. On Friday, a hard-fought global treaty to protect the “cornucopia of biodiversity” living there cleared a final hurdle and will become international law.
The High Seas Treaty, as it is known, was ratified by a 60th nation, Morocco, crossing the threshold for United Nations treaties to go into effect. Two decades in the making, it allows for the establishment of enormous conservation zones in international waters.
Environmentalists hailed it as a historic moment. The treaty “is a conservation opportunity that happens once in a generation, if that,” said Lisa Speer, who directs the International Oceans Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
It is also a bright spot amid a general dimming of optimism about international diplomacy and cooperation among nations toward common goals. It will come into force just as the high seas are poised to become the site of controversial industrial activities including deep sea mining.
The treaty provides a comprehensive set of regulations for high seas conservation that would supersede the existing patchwork of rules developed by United Nations agencies and industrial organizations in sectors like oil, fishing and shipping. Currently, less than 10 percent of the world’s oceans are protected under law, and conservation advocates say little of that protection is effective. The treaty states a goal of giving 30 percent of the high seas some kind of protected status by 2030.
A majority of the world’s nations signed off on the treaty’s language in 2023, but for it to become legally binding for those countries they must each ratify it, usually through their legislatures. Once a treaty crosses the threshold of 60 ratifications, it sets off what is essentially a four month countdown for the treaty to become enshrined in international law. More ratifications are expected to be announced during the U.N. General Assembly next week.
“The high seas don’t belong to anyone. What exists there is everyone’s,” said Julio Cordano, a Chilean official who spent years negotiating the treaty’s terms. “It must be governed on principles of prudence and fairness. This agreement makes that possible.”
Mr. Cordano said he was already working with conservationists to design a marine protected area around two chains of underwater volcanoes, the Salas y Gómez and Nazca ridges. The creatures that feed in the nutrient-rich water surrounding the seamounts are little studied but are part of an intricate ecosystem that supports seabirds, whales and sea turtles. At least 82 of the known species that live there are considered threatened or endangered.
The United States signed the treaty under the Biden administration, and Ms. Speer said American negotiators played a “very important role in drafting” it, but that since President Trump took office “the U.S. has kind of checked out.” While the United States has signed U.N. treaties pertaining to marine conservation, it has ratified none. Instead, the U.S. government has selected portions of previous treaties that it considers “customary international law,” while disregarding stipulations it disagrees with.
Kim Doster, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which regulates U.S. conservation and commercial activity in the oceans, declined to comment on how the agency would interpret the passage of the High Seas Treaty.
As with all United Nations treaties, direct enforcement options are limited. But the countries that have ratified it are essentially pledging to uphold it as law, and can band together to try to compel countries that have not ratified to respect its terms.
In April, President Trump issued an executive order that would allow NOAA to issue permits for deep sea mining in international waters, a move that dozens of other countries said breached the terms of an earlier U.N. treaty, commonly known as the Law of the Sea. That treaty says that no mining should happen in international waters until a U.N. body, the International Seabed Authority, agrees on how to monitor and regulate the industry. The seabed authority has delayed its issuance of those guidelines several times in recent years.
NOAA is considering an application from the Metals Company, a Canadian company that, through a U.S. subsidiary, aims to be the first deep sea miner. The company is proposing to mine in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, about halfway between Hawaii and Mexico, where the seafloor is dotted with countless potato-size nodules that contain valuable metals such as nickel and manganese.
In a statement to The New York Times, a spokesman for the Metals Company neither welcomed nor dismissed the High Seas Treaty. The statement said that while the company was pushing forward with its application in Washington, it was aligned with the treaty’s goal of protecting 30 percent of the world’s oceans and that it planned to protect the same amount in the tracts of ocean where it might one day be mining.
Some of the Metals Company’s partners, including the government of the Netherlands and a Japanese company it has worked with to process its minerals, have raised concerns that the company’s partnership with the Trump administration may land its partners in murky legal waters. The High Seas Treaty would add another layer of complexity facing prospective deep sea miners, as some nations may seek to use it to protect areas that are also rich in minerals.
“Even though Trump is trying to end-run all this, it will have an impact on the United States,” said Russ Feingold, a Democratic former senator from Wisconsin and advocate for the treaty. “It creates an international regime that the U.S. could ignore, but that its companies may struggle to if they want to do international business.”
The United States is not alone among powerful countries in its hesitance to ratify the treaty. France is the only member of the Group of 7 Western power brokers to do so. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the treaty and his main negotiator, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, said he expected others, but not the United States, to eventually ratify it.
“Macron told all our ambassadors to take this as seriously as the war in Ukraine, from a diplomatic standpoint,” Mr. Poivre d’Arvor said in an interview.
Because France continues to administer dozens of islands it colonized more than a century ago, it holds the second-largest amount of ocean as part of its domestic territory, after the United States, which also colonized numerous islands, particularly in the Pacific Ocean.
While the treaty’s main purpose is to create conservation areas, it also provides a framework for ratifiers to share the proceeds from resources generated from biodiversity in the high seas. That assuaged a main concern from developing nations, which said that they had a right to share in both scientific knowledge and in possible future profits coming from what they see as a collective inheritance. Genetic material sourced from high-seas marine organisms — such as bacteria, corals or deep-sea sponges — may find applications in medicine, cosmetics, food, and biotechnology.
The treaty is also intended to protect species like tuna, salmon, whales and sharks that traverse the high seas before ending up in countries’ territorial waters, where they contribute to human diets and economic activity. “Marine creatures don’t respect political boundaries,” Ms. Speer said.
Max Bearak is a Times reporter who writes about global energy and climate policies and new approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
