Multilateralism is waiting for Germany. On Saturday, the United Nations’ agreement to protect the high seas will take effect. And Germany is not participating for the time being.
The Federal Republic had even been among the first signatories to the agreement. The then Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) had decisively driven the conclusion forward.
Her ministry at the time was still confident of being among the first signatories to the High Seas Protection Agreement as it entered into force. Then the traffic-light coalition collapsed; Lemke could no longer turn membership in the agreement into law and bring it through the Bundestag. Black-Red has not yet caught up on this.
Two-thirds of the oceans are high seas. This represents about 40 percent of the Earth’s surface. The high seas are those parts of the ocean that do not lie within a state’s territorial waters extending up to 12 nautical miles, nor within its 200-nautical-mile economic zone. These blue expanses are no-man’s-land—and have until now largely remained unprotected.
A decisive step toward protecting the high seas
The High Seas Protection Agreement is a crucial step toward achieving the so-called 30×30 target of the 2022 World Conservation Conference in Montreal. At that time, the international community committed to protecting 30 percent of land and seas by 2030.
The High Seas Protection Agreement is meant to protect biodiversity from the ocean surface through the water column below down to the deep sea. It enables marine protected areas, provides environmental impact assessments before such as new fishing methods are used, regulates the use of marine genetic resources, and supports knowledge exchange as well as funding even in Global South countries. The official name is Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, often abbreviated as BBNJ.
“Before, that was a legal vacuum; it was practically the Wild West,” says Lioba Schwarzer, head of the Marine Protection team at the Deutsche Umwelthilfe. Now the international community has a say in what happens on the high seas. “The high seas account for almost half of our planet. The biodiversity there will finally be protected by the High Seas Protection Agreement,” Schwarzer adds. The agreement is therefore so important because it creates a legal framework.
Two decades of negotiations had stretched on. In June 2023, more than 160 states agreed on the United Nations High Seas Protection Agreement. In the meantime, additional states joined. Now the multilateral agreement enters into force: 120 days after the 60th state had ratified the agreement domestically. That is the prerequisite for the agreement to become binding. As of now, 145 parties have signed, 81 have ratified.
Germany, however, is not among them. In the negotiations, the Federal Republic was still a driving force under Environment Minister Lemke. Has her successor, Carsten Schneider (SPD), failed?
Schneider said on Saturday: “We will belong to those contracting states that will participate in the first Ocean COP. We are already working with partners from Africa, South America and Asia to soon designate the first protected areas in the oceans.”
The original goal was for Germany to have the agreement approved for entry into force. “For ratification in Germany, two laws are needed,” said a spokesperson for the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Protection, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMUKN) to . “Therefore the procedure is somewhat more elaborate than in other countries.” The cabinet had only recently approved the two laws in December.
The agreement becomes a critical time issue
Even among environmental groups, there is consensus that Germany’s slowness is not to be blamed on Carsten Schneider. Rather, it stems from the break in the traffic-light coalition. Germany is already working on the substantive implementation of the agreement. What matters is that the High Seas Protection Agreement be ratified by the summer, according to the associations. Then the first Conference of the Parties (COP) will take place. “If we do not ratify by then, we will for the time being have no say in BBNJ,” says Franziska Saalmann, a Greenpeace marine protection expert.
The two laws, according to the BMUKN spokesperson, were expected to go through Parliament by March. “But we expect that we will have ratified before the first Ocean COP.” It is expected to take place in August. The BMUKN told : “Marine protection is among the minister’s top priorities.”
That Germany has not yet ratified the agreement by its entry into force also makes a difference today, says Franziska Saalmann of Greenpeace. Only the countries that have ratified are bound to implement it, as with the regional fisheries organization or rules on deep-sea mining. “And it is a missing signal to the world community that Germany is not among the first states to ratify the agreement,” Saalmann adds.
