Nearly 70 countries at the UN on Wednesday signed a first-ever treaty on protecting the international high seas.
“It’s an amazing moment to be here and see such multilateral cooperation and so much hope,” actress Sigourney Weaver said in New York as the signatures opened.
The treaty marks change in “the way we view the ocean, from a big garbage dump and a place where we can take stuff, to a place that we take care of, that we steward, we respect,” Weaver said.
Photo: AFP
Sixty-seven states signed the treaty on the first day, including the US, China, Australia, Britain, France, Germany and Mexico, as well as the EU as a whole, the UN said.
However, each signatory must still ratify the treaty under its own domestic process.
The treaty would take effect 120 days after 60 members ratify it.
“It is clear that the ocean is in urgent need of protection,” Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Vincent van Quickenborne said.
Without action, “it’s game over,” he said.
After 15 years of discussion, the UN sealed the first treaty on the high seas in June by consensus.
The start of signatures marks “a new chapter” of “establishing meaningful protections” for the oceans, said Nichola Clark of the Ocean Governance Project at The Pew Charitable Trusts.
The high seas are defined as the ocean area starting beyond countries’ exclusive economic zones, or 200 nautical miles (370km) off coastlines — covering nearly half the planet.
A key tool in the treaty would be the ability to create protected marine areas in international waters — only about 1 percent of which are now protected by any conservation measures.
The treaty is seen as crucial to an agreement to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans and lands by 2030, as agreed by governments in a separate accord on biodiversity reached in Montreal in December last year.
Mads Christensen, interim executive director of Greenpeace International, voiced hope that the high-seas treaty would come into force in 2025, when the next UN oceans conference is scheduled in France.
“We have less than seven years to protect 30 percent of the oceans. There is no time to waste,” Christensen said.
“The race to ratification has begun and we urge countries to be ambitious, ratify the treaty and make sure it enters into force in 2025,” he added.
However, even if the treaty draws the 60 ratifications needed to come into force, it would still be well below the universal support for action sought by environmentalists.
The treaty, officially known as the treaty on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, also introduces requirements to carry out environmental impact studies for proposed activities on the high seas.
Such activities, while not listed in the text, would include anything from fishing and maritime transport to deep-sea mining or geoengineering programs.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS