Delegates from around the world convened in Nice, France, last week to discuss a range of ocean priorities, including the implementation of a recently finalized “high seas treaty” to protect the two-thirds of the oceans that lie outside countries’ control. 

It was the third United Nations Ocean Conference, a high-level forum meant to advance the U.N.’s sustainable development goal to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans.” This year’s co-hosts, France and Costa Rica, urged other countries to step up marine conservation efforts in light of overlapping ocean crises, from plastic pollution and ocean acidification to rising sea levels that are jeopardizing small island nations. António Guterres, the U.N.’s secretary-general, said in his opening remarks that oceans are “the ultimate shared resource” and that they should foster multilateral cooperation.

Whether the conference was a success depends on whom you ask. The most prominent outcome of the meeting was a flurry of voluntary and rhetorical commitments made by countries to conserve marine resources. Some of these, like France’s pledge to limit a destructive kind of fishing called bottom trawling, were criticized as insufficient. France had also promoted the conference as a sort of deadline for reaching 60 ratifications of the high seas treaty — a threshold needed for it to enter into force — but this didn’t happen, leading to disappointment among ocean advocates

On the other hand, experts said there were real signs of progress. Germany and the European Union pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward marine conservation, for example, and 11 governments signed a new pledge to safeguard coral reefs. Nearly 20 countries ratified the high seas treaty over just a few days, bringing the total up to 50.

Angelique Pouponneau, the lead ocean negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a negotiating bloc of 39 countries, said in a statement that the conference had been “a moment of both progress and reflection.” Former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, who also served as special envoy on climate under the Biden administration, noted “critical momentum to safeguard our planet.” 

The biggest focus of the U.N. Ocean Conference was the high seas treaty, also known as the agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdictions. Adopted by U.N. member states in 2023 after more than 20 years of negotiations, the treaty aims to solve a longstanding problem in marine protection: how to safeguard parts of the ocean that lie outside countries’ “exclusive economic zones,” swaths of water that stretch about 200 nautical miles beyond their coastlines. As of now, countries can unilaterally create marine protected areas within their economic zones. They usually restrict resource extraction and industrial fishing in these areas, often with exceptions for small-scale fishers. Many countries have established such zones, but they need the high seas treaty to create a legal framework for doing the same thing in more distant waters.

France had made it a priority to reach 60 ratifications of the high seas treaty either before or during the third Ocean Conference; doing so would kick off a 120-day countdown for the agreement to enter into force. Not enough countries signed on, though the conference did seem to accelerate the ratification process: At a special event on the conference’s first day, 18 countries announced their ratification, including several small coastal states like Ivory Coast and Vanuatu, bringing the total to 50 (including the European Union, which has ratified it as a bloc). Each country has its own laws and processes for ratifying treaties; upon ratification, it formally lets the U.N. know and agrees to be bound by the terms of the relevant treaty.

France’s special envoy to the talks, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, wrote on LinkedIn that he expects the remaining ratifications by the next U.N. General Assembly meeting this September. That would still be pretty fast, compared to other multilateral environmental agreements. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example — the world’s main legal framework for regulating maritime activities like shipping and fishing, and for establishing countries’ exclusive economic zones —— took eight years to reach 60 ratifications. Only a few agreements, like the Paris Agreement to address global warming, were ratified faster.

Rebecca Hubbard, director of a coalition of environmental nonprofits advocating for the high seas treaty called High Seas Alliance, said in a statement that the world was “within striking distance” of the 60th ratification. “The treaty’s entry into force could be triggered in a matter of weeks,” she said.

Several experts Grist spoke with said marine protected areas are essential for advancing the U.N. target to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water by 2030. Robert Blasiak, an associate professor of sustainable ocean stewardship at Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Center, estimated that without a high seas treaty, countries would have to designate some 90 percent of their waters as marine protected areas — an unlikely scenario. French Polynesia, however, made a splash at the Ocean Conference by declaring the entirety of its exclusive economic zone — all 1.9 million square miles of it — a marine protected area, making it the largest in the world.

Other declarations and pledges from the U.N. Ocean Conference linked oceans to climate change, plastic pollution, economic inequality, and the erosion of public trust in science. During daily plenaries, many delegates delivered statements about a healthy ocean’s role in mitigating global warming — it absorbs 90 percent of the excess heat generated by the burning of fossil fuels — and some called for nations to “emphasize the essential role of ocean-based solutions”

 in their climate targets under the Paris Agreement, for example by protecting ocean ecosystems like mangroves and coral reefs. Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho, the princess of Tonga, called for whales to be recognized as legal persons — part of a broader movement to establish inherent rights for natural entities.

Leaders from many countries also reiterated calls for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, including French president Emmanuel Macron, who called it “madness” to proceed with mineral extraction from the largely unexplored seafloor. Separately, nearly 100 national representatives released a statement reaffirming their commitment to crafting an “ambitious” U.N. plastics treaty during negotiations that are set to resume this August. And a letter signed by more than 100 scientists, Indigenous leaders, and environmental advocates called for the adoption of an “ocean protection principle” that prioritizes conservation over the “irresponsible and unrestrained pursuit of profit.”

One pledge that was not well received was French president Emmanuel Macron’s promise to “limit” bottom trawling, a type of commercial fishing that involves dragging a heavy net across the bottom of the ocean, kicking up debris and releasing carbon dioxide in the process. Environmental groups lambasted the plan for applying to only 4 percent of French waters — mostly in places where bottom trawling does not occur, according to the international nonprofit Oceana. “These announcements are more symbolic than impactful,” the group’s campaign director, Nicolas Fournier, said in a statement.

Other groups said the conference hadn’t placed enough emphasis on issues such as offshore oil and gas extraction and the rights of fishers. They noted with caution the nonbinding nature of many countries’ pledges and urged world leaders to “turn promises into action.” 

“Ultimately, this summit produced a mere drop in the bucket of what we desperately need to protect the ocean — the lungs of our planet,” Enric Sala, a marine ecologist and National Geographic explorer, said in a statement.