Marine Policy

UNCLOS and the Jurisdiction Map

The foundational document of modern marine law is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982 and entered into force in 1994. It defines who controls what part of the ocean.

UNCLOS divides ocean jurisdiction into zones, measured from the coastline (specifically, from a country's baseline, which is usually the low-tide line):

Territorial Sea (0–12 nautical miles) — Full sovereignty. The coastal state controls these waters as if they were land, with limited rights of innocent passage for foreign vessels.

Contiguous Zone (12–24 nautical miles) — Limited enforcement jurisdiction. Coastal states can enforce customs, immigration, and pollution laws.

Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ, 0–200 nautical miles) — The coastal state has exclusive rights to natural resources (fish, oil, gas, minerals, biological resources) in this zone, but doesn't fully control the surface or airspace. EEZs together cover about 36% of the ocean and contain the vast majority of commercially valuable fish stocks.

Continental Shelf — Can extend beyond the 200-mile EEZ if the geological shelf does. Coastal states have rights to seabed resources but not to the water column above. This is where deep-sea mining disputes typically happen.

High Seas (beyond 200 nm) — International waters. No country has jurisdiction. Open to all states for navigation, fishing, scientific research, and traditionally for any other lawful use. This is where the regulatory gaps are biggest.

The Area — The seabed beneath the high seas. Designated as the "common heritage of mankind" under UNCLOS. Managed by the International Seabed Authority, an obscure but increasingly important UN body that regulates seabed mining.

This jurisdictional map matters enormously. A whale that migrates from a national MPA into the high seas leaves all legal protection behind. A fishing fleet that exhausts its quota in one country's EEZ can simply move to the high seas. A mining operation can target deep-sea minerals in the Area without any national government having the authority to stop it — only the ISA can.

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The High Seas Treaty (BBNJ)

For decades, marine conservationists pointed to a glaring problem: UNCLOS contained almost no specific protections for biodiversity in the high seas. You couldn't designate a marine protected area beyond national jurisdiction. There was no clear process for environmental impact assessment of new high-seas activities. There was no mechanism for sharing benefits from marine genetic resources discovered in international waters.

In March 2023, after nearly two decades of negotiation, the United Nations adopted the Agreement on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction — usually called the BBNJ Treaty or the High Seas Treaty. It's one of the most significant pieces of international environmental law in recent decades.

The treaty has four main pillars:

1. Marine Genetic Resources (MGRs). Sets up a framework for sharing benefits from genetic resources collected in the high seas. This addresses a long-standing concern that wealthy nations and biotech companies could profit from international biodiversity without compensating the global community. Marine biotechnology (MB9, MB10) is directly affected.

2. Area-Based Management Tools, including Marine Protected Areas. For the first time, the treaty creates a process for designating MPAs in the high seas. This is essential for achieving the 30x30 goal (MB8) — there's no way to protect 30% of the ocean without protecting some of the high seas.

3. Environmental Impact Assessments. Requires assessment of activities that could affect high-seas biodiversity, similar to environmental review processes that already exist for activities within national jurisdictions.

4. Capacity Building and Technology Transfer. Provides support for developing countries to participate meaningfully in high-seas governance and benefit from marine science.

The treaty was opened for signature in 2023 and needs 60 ratifications to enter into force. As of 2024, ratifications are accumulating but the threshold hasn't yet been crossed. Even when it does enter into force, implementation will be a multi-decade project.

The treaty is widely considered a major win for marine conservation. But it's also a reminder of how slow international environmental law moves. The framework was first proposed in the 2000s. Negotiations ran nearly 20 years. Implementation will take decades. The ocean cannot necessarily wait.

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Fisheries Management: The Hardest Problem

Fisheries management is where marine biology, economics, and politics collide most violently — and where the stakes are largest. Roughly 3 billion people depend on fish as a major source of protein, and the world catches over 80 million tons of wild fish annually.

The fundamental challenge: fish are a common-pool resource. They reproduce on their own (a renewable resource), but unlimited fishing leads to collapse (the tragedy of the commons). Without management, every individual fisher has an incentive to catch as much as possible — but if everyone does that, the resource collapses and everyone loses.

Management tools:

Quotas and Catch Limits. The most common approach. A scientific advisory body estimates the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) — the largest catch that can be taken indefinitely without depleting the stock. Quotas are then allocated among fishers, fleets, or countries.

Total Allowable Catch (TAC) quotas have been used in Atlantic cod, Pacific salmon, North Sea herring, and many others. They work — but only when the science is accurate, the allocation is enforced, and political pressure doesn't override scientific advice.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Already covered in MB8. Effective MPAs benefit fisheries by providing nursery areas where fish can grow and reproduce before spilling over into fished waters.

Gear restrictions. Banning specific destructive gear types — bottom trawls that destroy seafloor habitat, drift nets that catch everything indiscriminately, longlines that catch bycatch like sea turtles and seabirds.

Seasonal and area closures. Closing fisheries during spawning seasons or in known critical habitats.

Bycatch limits. Setting caps on incidental catch of non-target species (especially marine mammals, sea turtles, sharks).

Catch shares / Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs). Each fisher owns a transferable share of the catch. Has been effective in some fisheries (Alaska, Iceland, New Zealand) but raises equity concerns when shares concentrate among large companies.

Major challenges:

• Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing accounts for an estimated 20% of global catch by some studies. It undercuts legitimate fishers, evades management measures, and is essentially impossible to fully prevent on the high seas.

• Bycatch — the unintended catch of non-target species — kills millions of marine mammals, seabirds, and sharks annually. Some fisheries (especially shrimp trawling) discard more biomass than they keep.

• Subsidies. Governments globally spend roughly $22 billion per year subsidizing fishing — much of it supporting overfishing and IUU activity. Reforming subsidies is one of the most powerful (and politically difficult) levers in marine conservation.

• Fleet overcapacity. The global fishing fleet has roughly twice the capacity the ocean can sustainably support. Reducing capacity requires displacing workers and absorbing economic costs — politically painful in any country.

When fisheries management works, it works dramatically. Atlantic striped bass populations crashed in the 1980s and recovered after strict quota implementation. New Zealand's quota system has stabilized many of its fisheries. Norway's mackerel fishery is one of the most productive and best-managed in the world.

When it fails, it fails catastrophically. The Newfoundland cod fishery collapsed in 1992 after decades of overfishing despite scientific warnings — 35,000 fishery workers lost their jobs overnight, and the population has not recovered three decades later. The Atlantic bluefin tuna remains a textbook example of how political pressure overrides scientific quotas year after year.

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Regional and Sectoral Frameworks

Beyond UNCLOS and fisheries-specific treaties, marine policy is built from a patchwork of regional and sectoral agreements:

Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs). Treaty-based bodies that manage fisheries in specific ocean regions. Examples: ICCAT (tuna in the Atlantic), CCAMLR (Southern Ocean), NAFO (Northwest Atlantic). RFMOs vary enormously in effectiveness. CCAMLR is often cited as one of the better-run examples; others struggle with non-compliance and political dysfunction.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC). Established in 1946 to regulate whaling. Imposed a global moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982. Japan, Norway, and Iceland have continued various forms of whaling under exceptions or by leaving the commission. The IWC is sometimes credited with saving multiple whale species from extinction.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Restricts trade in species threatened with extinction. Several marine species are listed: sea turtles, certain sharks, sea horses, queen conch, totoaba.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Sets global biodiversity goals, including the 30x30 target. Its Nagoya Protocol governs access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing — directly relevant to marine bioprospecting (MB9).

The International Maritime Organization (IMO). Regulates shipping pollution, including the MARPOL Convention on oil spills and the Ballast Water Management Convention to prevent invasive species transport.

Regional Seas Programmes. UN-coordinated bodies addressing specific ocean regions — the Mediterranean (Barcelona Convention), Caribbean (Cartagena Convention), Northwest Pacific, and others.

National frameworks. Within EEZs, individual countries have their own marine policy: the Marine Protected Area network of New Zealand, the Magnuson-Stevens Act in the US, the EU Common Fisheries Policy, etc.

This patchwork is sometimes effective and often dysfunctional. Different agreements have different membership, different enforcement mechanisms, and different scientific standards. Coordination is improving — the BBNJ Treaty is partly an effort to integrate these frameworks — but the marine policy landscape remains complex, contested, and incomplete.

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Wait, Actually...

Industrial fishing fleets collectively emit more carbon than most countries.

A 2018 study in Science used satellite tracking to estimate the global fishing fleet's fuel consumption. The result: industrial fishing generates roughly 159 million tons of CO₂ equivalent per year — more than the combined emissions of about 130 individual countries. The most fuel-intensive fishing activities (like deep-sea trawling for shrimp or chasing high-value tuna across the open ocean) can use more energy to catch the fish than the fish itself contains as food energy.

This is one of the strangest facts in food systems. We are burning fossil fuels at planetary scale to extract a wild biological resource at rates that depend on those same fossil fuels for both extraction and refrigeration. It's an extractive system that doesn't reproduce its own energy inputs. And it's directly contributing to the climate change that's killing the ocean it depends on.

Reforming this — through fuel-efficient gear, shorter supply chains, dietary shifts, or alternatives like sustainable aquaculture — is one of the more underrated leverage points in climate policy.

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