While fisheries remain a central issue in many governance frameworks due to their economic and food security significance, the broader field of ocean governance has expanded to address a wider range of environmental issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and marine pollution,often referred to as the triple planetary crisis. Nevertheless, this broader environmental ocean governance agenda has often developed alongside, rather than integrated with, existing fisheries frameworks, highlighting an enduring institutional and conceptual divide.
This divide is especially evident in the governance of the High Seas. Traditionally, 95% of fishing occurs within Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) extending up to 200 nautical miles from coastlines and falling under national jurisdiction. However, declining fish stocks due to rising demand, climate change, and other socio-economic forces have pushed industrial fishing into the High Seas, where governance is weaker. Instruments like the UNCLOS and UNFSA emphasise the need for collaborative management of the High Seas and their resources, especially for economically critical, highly migratory, and transboundary species like tuna that migrate across EEZs and the High Seas. While the first Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (RFMO) was established in 1949, UNFSA strengthened RFMOs (UNFSA, 1995).
Despite these efforts, high-seas fishing has steadily increased in recent decades, raising equity and ecological concerns. These concerns are compounded by broader environmental pressures such as climate change and habitat destruction, exposing the limitations of existing frameworks. Many scholars and policymakers have argued that UNCLOS, regarded as “the constitution of the sea,” as well as other existing frameworks, are inadequate for protecting marine biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ). These concerns led to the negotiation and eventual adoption of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement in June 2023.
The BBNJ Agreement is the first legally binding instrument designed to conserve and sustainably use marine biodiversity in ABNJ. These areas, which include the High Seas (water column beyond the EEZ) and the Area (the seabed and subsoil thereof beyond national jurisdiction) as defined by UNCLOS (Articles 86 and 1(1)(1)/Part XI, respectively), cover over two-thirds of the ocean, and host diverse ecosystems vital for maintaining Earth’s life processes, including climate regulation. However, over the past decade, growing human pressures, such as plastic pollution and overfishing, have intensified scientific and governmental concerns over marine biodiversity protection. The BBNJ Agreement is expected to address these concerns and contribute to a more coherent and integrated framework for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in ABNJ.
However, despite its ambitious scope, the BBNJ Agreement faces an enduring challenge where the management of commercially valuable marine resources is often separate from broader marine biodiversity conservation objectives. Fisheries management and seabed mining received preferential treatment over broader biodiversity objectives. When asked about the relationship between fisheries and marine biodiversity during BBNJ negotiations, a Pacific Small Island Developing State (PSIDS) delegate remarked:
While PSIDS did not necessarily support excluding fisheries from marine biodiversity, this sentiment reflects the deeper tension between how individual fisheries stakeholders perceive fishery management and marine biodiversity conservation objectives. The tension partly centres on whether fish should be treated as part of marine biodiversity to which conservation objectives can be applied, or primarily as a resource already used and managed separately under existing regimes. This divide was also institutionalised in the final text of the BBNJ Agreement; fisheries and fishing-related activities were exempted from the Marine Genetic Resources (MGR) regime unless the fish were used explicitly for purposes covered under Part II of the BBNJ Agreement, such as bioprospecting (Article 10(2)). This legal carve-out effectively upheld a sectoral divide. Although fisheries are part of marine biodiversity and both influence and are affected by its broader state, their management could not be easily integrated into the BBNJ Agreement’s wider goals of conserving and sustainably using marine biodiversity in ABNJ.
The BBNJ Agreement enters a landscape where fisheries are already managed separately in practice, despite their ecological interconnectedness with wider marine biodiversity aspects. Fisheries frameworks like UNFSA and RFMOs have already set legally binding conservation and management measures, focusing on economically important fisheries. While they increasingly address bycatch species such as sharks, whales, and seabirds, contributing to broader conservation efforts, this is not their central focus.
RFMOs are typically divided into general, deep-sea, and tuna RFMOs. For example, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) oversee high-value tuna stocks such as bluefin, yellowfin, bigeye, skipjack, and albacore. Similarly, the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), a general RFMO, focuses, for example, on Atlantic cod, a key species in the North Atlantic fishing industry.
Only a few frameworks, such as the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), combine broader conservation objectives with fisheries management, allowing them, for example, to establish Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Notably, CCAMLR is sometimes considered an RFMO, but technically, it is a conservation organisation with fisheries management responsibilities. This diversity of institutional mandates and objectives has led to a fragmented ocean governance system (Fig. 1), in which biodiversity concerns are often treated separately from economic or sectoral priorities. International bodies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which sets global fisheries standards, could bridge the broader biodiversity and fisheries governance. However, limitations in their mandate, coordination, and enforcement impede this role.
Moreover, these tensions are also political and socio-economic. Industrialised fishing nations, including several Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members, dominate high-seas fishing with distant-water fleets (Sumaila et al. 2016), yet have the capacity for alternative marine uses. In contrast, developing coastal states, especially small island developing states (SIDS), rely heavily on migratory fish stocks spanning their EEZs and the High Seas. SIDS emphasise the ecological, economic, and cultural links between their waters and the adjacent High Seas, advocating governance that reflects these connections. Though often overlooked in ocean governance, landlocked developing states have also used the BBNJ negotiations platform to assert their interests in managing, accessing, and using resources in these global commons. Therefore, fisheries management in ABNJ is about ecological sustainability, access, benefit distribution, and intergenerational equity for fishing and non-fishing nations.
The BBNJ Agreement seeks to balance the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity, within an already fragmented institutional landscape and a highly contentious political environment. With the treaty text finalised, this paper examines how these tensions emerged during negotiations and how they were addressed or left unresolved. The tensions between fisheries management and broader marine biodiversity objectives, as expressed by the PSIDS delegate, underscore the need to assess how different stakeholders perceive this relationship. Various factors, including economic interests, institutional mandates, geopolitical priorities, and cultural values, shape these perceptions. Understanding how these factors influence stakeholders’ views is crucial for evaluating the Agreement’s effectiveness and the prospects for cooperation or conflict in its implementation. To explore this issue, this article draws on stakeholder views, including delegates, fisheries managers, and conservationists, from statements and interviews conducted during and after the BBNJ negotiations.
Read more on Scienmag: Latest Science and Health News
