The 193 countries of the United Nations have agreed on a first-of-its-kind treaty to protect the biodiversity of the world's oceans — a massive step toward a goal decades in the making. The agreement, which was reached at U.N. headquarters in New York over the weekend, still needs to be formally adopted by the intergovernmental organization and ratified by its individual member countries.
For more than a century, oceans have served as a de facto dumping ground for industrializing nations. Wealthy countries like the United States, which cast their plastic and other trash into the sea, rely on the ocean to suck up vast quantities of carbon emissions while plumbing its depths for seafood and offshore fossil fuels. As a result, oceans have grown progressively warmer, more acidic, and more polluted, which has jeopardized the extensive marine ecosystems that used to thrive below the surface. The U.N. began talks to adopt a legal framework to protect the ocean in 2004, but disagreements over which parts of the ocean should be protected, how wealthy and developing nations share marine resources, and how fossil fuel companies should navigate more stringent marine environmental regulations delayed agreement until now.
