The global treaty designed for the “objective of the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction,” adopted last year, has more recently gained an inaccurate, but popular, nickname, and lacks independent enforcement, according to some observers. Known officially as the BBNJ agreement (biodiversity beyond natural jurisdiction), it has since become known as the “high seas treaty” — despite its official name and U.N. website address, www.un.org/bbnj — and that’s a problem, our guest on this episode says. Ocean governance expert Elizabeth Mendenhall from the University of Rhode Island tells Mongabay that the new high seas moniker risks biasing the interpretation of what the BBNJ agreement was originally created to do: protect marine biodiversity in areas beyond state control. As she and co-author Fuad Bateh wrote in a commentary for Mongabay earlier this year, while the treaty addresses policy around benefits sharing in relation to marine genetic resources and other key details, the final text contains unresolved gray areas around how concepts such as the “common heritage” principle and the “freedom of the high seas” will be applied. She also says there’s a significant risk that business-as-usual exploitation could take advantage of the mythical freedom of the high seas and abet such activities’ continuance into marine protected areas, due to a lack of hierarchical entities to rein in international and regional oceans management organizations, which currently set their own rules for how they allow resource extraction from these areas. “The treaty design that we ended up…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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