The fourth negotiation session around a future treated on the large broad has not been successful, but a new step is proficient.
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No international treaty ready to be ratified, but also no renunciation between states on how to preserve oceanic biodiversity on the high seas. If the fourth – and theoretically last – Intergovernmental Conference on the Grand Large , which ended Friday, March 18 in New York, it concludes on nothing definitive, it nevertheless ends on an optimistic note. “These are long, technical discussions, but who are going well, Relates Olivier Pepper d’Arvor, French ambassador of the poles and maritime issues. There is no blockage despite the current geopolitical context. A fifth session should probably Having this summer, it will be conclusive before the end of 2022. “
These two weeks of negotiation even have a new start, since they gave rise to real debates between diplomats, technical exchanges, compromise sketches and strategic partnerships, rather than simple solemn declarations by States opposed or favorable to the addition of an environmental component to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
This fundamental text, signed in 1982, has almost nothing in this chapter. For the United Nations, it was time to remedy it, at the same time because the consciousness of the importance of the marine world is progressing on this planet, but also because this gigantic share of the ocean, located. Beyond areas dependent on jurisdictions of coastal countries, is increasingly busy. Maritime Transport, Fishing, Underwater Cables, Scientific Research, Exploration of Funds, Activities are multiplying. But without legal rule protecting marine life, which is more intense than we imagined a few decades ago.
“Accelerate the work”
The UN discusses it since … 2006 and ended up with a negotiation cycle in 2018, that CVIV-19 came to curb. The future international treaty must take the form of a binding legal tool that focuses on four pillars. For the preservation of biodiversity, it is a question of defining “zone management tools”, in particular marine protected areas of the high seas, and to introduce the obligation to conduct environmental impact studies for all works from a threshold that remains to be defined. The second slope responds to a whole other ambition: that of a “sustainable use of marine biodiversity”, in other words to organize in order to take advantage of the future of the riches of this common heritage. Developing countries that do not have the same ways to achieve it as richer countries, it is said that the exploitation of genetic resources will have to give rise to a sharing of profits, and that “capacity building” aid ” In the field of science and the transfer of marine technologies will have to be considered.
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