High Seas Treaty Hits 100 Nations. Now Prove It

The open ocean finally has a law with teeth, and one hundred countries are now behind it. This week, Germany, Papua New Guinea, Zimbabwe, Canada, Australia and Brunei Darussalam formally ratified the High Seas Treaty at the UN General Assembly, pushing the agreement past the triple-digit milestone, according to the High Seas Alliance. The new ratifications landed almost exactly a year after the treaty crossed the sixty-party threshold it needed to enter into force.

Formally known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction agreement, the High Seas Treaty is the first comprehensive legal framework for protecting life in waters beyond any country's control, an area covering nearly half the planet's surface, the High Seas Alliance said in its September announcement. It entered into force on January 17, 2026, after almost two decades of negotiation, and gives governments a shared tool against climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said the treaty can "ensure the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of over two-thirds of our life-sustaining ocean space," according to his published statement on the agreement. Oceanographic reported the milestone on September 24, describing the mood as a shift from negotiation to implementation.

What COP1 has to decide

The High Seas Treaty has now entered its implementation phase, and the first Conference of the Parties, COP1, is scheduled for January 2027. According to the High Seas Alliance, that meeting must agree on the institutions and operating rules that will govern the treaty long term. Central to the agenda are standards for environmental impact assessments and a path to creating highly and fully protected marine areas on the high seas. Only countries that have ratified the High Seas Treaty can vote on those decisions, and that detail matters more than it sounds: Deeper Blue reported that countries which have not ratified get no seat at the table where the rules for nearly half the planet are written.

Plenty of chairs are still empty. Blue Economy News reported that forty-five signatories have yet to ratify the High Seas Treaty, and each one that holds out cedes influence over how the ocean's shared spaces get governed.

Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance, said in the announcement that the milestone shows the world uniting around ocean protection even in divided times, but warned the work is far from finished. "We need more countries to ratify to achieve equitable global ocean protection by 2030," Hubbard said, as reported by the Fairmont Post. "How countries engage in this first critical meeting will set the tone for every COP that follows, and too much is on the line to get this wrong."

Why this matters if you will live to see 2060

The treaty exists for a concrete reason: the global pledge to conserve at least thirty percent of the world's oceans by the end of the decade. That target is unreachable without the high seas, which this agreement alone opens up for real protection. But paper promises and protected water are different things. The Ocean Protection Gap Report warns that at the current pace, the world would land only about halfway to the 30x30 target, a shortfall the High Seas Treaty was designed to close. You can read more about that gap in this analysis of the milestone.

There is a justice story here too. The treaty's membership already spans maritime powers, small island states, developing countries and even several landlocked nations, according to the High Seas Alliance, which called ocean protection a shared global responsibility rather than a coastal one. That is a genuine break from the old order, where a High Seas Treaty of this kind did not exist, where the biggest fishing and shipping nations wrote the rules by default. Young climate organizers have been pushing for exactly this kind of binding global deal for years, which is why movements like the young African climate activists rewriting the rules matter: treaties do not enforce themselves, and the pressure to turn signatures into enforcement usually comes from outside the negotiating room.

So the hundred-ratification headline for the High Seas Treaty is real, and it is worth a moment of optimism. But a treaty is only as strong as its first enforcement meeting. That meeting is COP1, and the forty-five countries still holding out will decide whether the high seas get protection on paper or protection on the water, and how fast the first marine protected areas take shape. Keep up with this story in GenZNewZ's social justice coverage and our climate emergency desk.