Four countries last week ratified the High Seas Treaty, allowing that United Nations agreement to take effect next year even as the Trump administration pushes to open the world’s ocean bottoms to critical minerals extraction.
The ratification by four countries — Sri Lanka, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Sierra Leone, and Morocco — effectively started a 120-day clock on implementation of the 2023 U.N. oceans biodiversity treaty for international waters, generally defined as beyond 200 nautical miles of a nation’s coast.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the moment a “historic achievement for the ocean and for multilateralism.”
But the Trump administration is already positioned to bypass the treaty’s fundamental principles, including a requirement that any ocean activity in international waters undergo an environmental assessment by the U.N. agency charged with overseeing that activity.
