SETH W. JAMES

The High Seas Treaty and the Limits of Non-Carbon Climate Action

March 12, 2023

By Seth W. James

On Sunday, March 5^th 2023, after nearly 20 years of setbacks and delays, the United Nations reached an agreement on The High Seas Treaty.  As NPR reports, “[t]he treaty will create a new body to manage conservation of ocean life and establish marine protected areas in the high seas . . . in the regions outside national boundary waters . . . [t]he treaty also establishes ground rules for conducting environmental impact assessments for commercial activities in the oceans.”  The current treaty is the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was created in 1982 and came into force in 1994 and does not address the challenges facing ocean ecosystems and food webs.  Sadly, the new treaty—as important a step forward as it is—also lacks a mechanism for saving the oceans as we know them today.

The problem with The High Seas Treaty is that it does not address the fundamental threat to Earth’s oceans, which is, of course, climate change.  The increase in atmospheric carbon is having—and will continue to have an ever-worsening—effect on ocean acidification.  As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, describes it:

“When CO2 is absorbed by seawater, a series of chemical reactions occur resulting in the increased concentration of hydrogen ions. This increase causes the seawater to become more acidic and causes carbonate ions to be relatively less abundant.  Carbonate ions are an important building block of structures such as sea shells and coral skeletons. Decreases in carbonate ions can make building and maintaining shells and other calcium carbonate structures difficult for calcifying organisms such as oysters, clams, sea urchins, shallow water corals, deep sea corals, and calcareous plankton.”

So, in other words, there is and will be plenty of carbon in the oceans, but it won’t be available to the creatures that need it to build shells, skeletons, eggs, and similar structures.  And while the extinction of shellfish everywhere may come as a blow to oyster bars and their many patrons around the world—to say nothing of the three billion people who rely on the oceans as their primary source of protein and other nutrients—the extinction of tiny, shell-building animals at the bottom of the food chain will cause entire food webs to collapse.  Consider this, also from the NOAA:

““The pteropod, or “sea butterfly,” is a tiny sea snail about the size of a small pea. Pteropods are an important part of many food webs and eaten by organisms ranging in size from tiny krill to whales. When pteropod shells were placed in sea water with pH and carbonate levels projected for the year 2100, the shells slowly dissolved after 45 days. Researchers have already discovered severe levels of pteropod shell dissolution in the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica.”

By the NOAA’s estimation, therefore, by the year 2100, pteropods will dissolve away to nothing in the world’s oceans—and everything above them in the food web will starve.

Though the conservation efforts set forth in The High Seas Treaty will undoubtedly produce positive impacts for humanity’s stewardship of Earth’s oceans, without comprehensive action to reduce atmospheric carbon, the benefits of the new treaty can only be seen as near-term.  In the long term, the collapse of oceanic food webs still looms with no solution in sight.  See you in 77 years.