The high seas have for long suffered silently as humans abused the life-giving ecosystems they nurture. Now, a first-of-its-kind United Nations treaty promises to restore nature’s balance a bit. The deal, two decades in the making, is critical if the world is to enforce the agreement achieved at the UN Biodiversity Conference in December 2022 to turn 30% of the world’s oceans into protected marine areas by 2030. The fact that the pact took this long for countries to agree on — they still need to ratify it — reveals that even amidst the broader neglect of the environment, the planet’s oceans have been taken particularly for granted. While pollution in the atmosphere — from the depletion of the ozone layer to the fumes ejected by the thousands of airliners that traverse the skies daily — has rightly been a key focus for decades, the high seas have received just a fraction of that attention. To be sure, many more people fly than the those that sail. Nevertheless, that hasn’t made the blue waters that cover most of the planet at all immune to damage from humans.

Giant ships routinely dump tonnes of garbage into the oceans; others engage in dangerous deepsea trawling. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant island of trash three times the size of France, sits between Hawaii and Japan. From the Arctic to the Pacific, insatiable greed for profits is turning nations and their companies into rapacious hunters for undersea minerals. Oceans, which over centuries have served as sinks absorbing a bulk of the planet’s carbon dioxide, are warming as a result. That, in turn, is accelerating the worst effects of climate change, leaving island and coastal communities in the Global South most vulnerable to deadly floods and storms with an ever-increasing frequency. Ocean levels are rising, threatening the very existence of some islands. At the same time, pollutants are also killing coral populations that are home to vital species that birds depend on for their feed. All of this is a reminder that the fates of the planet’s multiple species are interlinked. To protect humankind, oceans must be saved. A global agreement to move towards that aim is a much-delayed, but essential, first step. Next, countries must follow through with national commitments to save the seas, and the UN must hold them accountable. Otherwise, nature will.