Guillermo Ortuño Crespo
Co-Lead of the IUCN WCPA High Seas Specialist Group
At 9:40 pm local New York time, and after more than 24 hours of additional negotiations, the BBNJ Treaty chair called all participants together to announce the end of the negotiations as the parties had reached agreement on the text of the new treaty.
Although the final text has not yet been published, all previous drafts point to a treaty where consensus prevailed to perfection. Although it is far from the treaty that many members of the scientific community and civil society would have wished for and that the planet's biodiversity deserves, the new text is a step in the right direction towards the conservation and sustainable use of nature on no less than 46% of the Earth's surface.
The treaty, which is divided into four main sections, creates, for the first time, mechanisms for the creation of marine protected areas in international waters. Once the text is signed, the complicated process of ratification and implementation will begin, which will face, among others, the industrial fleets of several countries, including Spain's, which have enjoyed several decades of unlimited environmental impact in international waters. The section of the treaty causing much of the delay has to do with the redistribution of benefits from the international genetic heritage from which a few countries or companies have benefited so far; as it belongs to all of us, any derivative of this genetic material from species on the high seas belongs to all of us, and it is in these terms that the fiercest negotiations of this process have been conducted. Other issues related to national sovereignty and voting modalities were also debated to the end.
After this agreement in principle the work continues, as the text must be polished and translated into the six official UN languages; President Rena Lee made it clear that the content of the text would not be altered in this process. The parties will meet again at a future date for ratification of the treaty.