High Seas Treaty Enters Into Force, Creating a New Compliance Frontier

The UN agreement on marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction — widely known as the High Seas Treaty, or the BBNJ Agreement — entered into force in January 2026, converting years of negotiation into binding international law. For companies whose vessels, cargoes, investments or research programmes reach beyond the limits of national jurisdiction, the practical significance lies less in any single headline obligation than in the additional compliance layer the treaty places on top of regulators that already govern the ocean.

That layer is being assembled while its operating instructions remain unwritten. The treaty's first Conference of the Parties, which must be convened within a year of entry into force, will settle much of the detail that compliance teams actually need: how environmental impact assessments are reviewed, how marine protected areas are designated, how benefit-sharing is calculated, and how the new regime relates to the bodies that already regulate shipping, fishing and seabed mining.

From voluntary commitments to enforceable duties

The agreement sits under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and was adopted in 2023 after nearly two decades of negotiation. It entered into force once the sixtieth instrument of ratification was deposited, a threshold that converted a diplomatic framework into an operative legal instrument with its own institutions and decision-making process.

The obligations run to states parties rather than directly to companies. But states parties must implement and enforce them, and for most operators the binding effect arrives through familiar channels: flag-state regulation for vessels, sponsorship and licensing for seabed contractors, permitting for research cruises, and conditions attached to consents, financing and insurance.

That indirection matters. Ocean-governance commitments that companies previously tracked as soft-law reputational issues now sit inside a regime for which a state can be held internationally responsible. Operators regulated by a state party inherit the consequences of that state's implementation choices — including the choice to implement narrowly.

Environmental impact assessment and area-based management

The first core mechanism is environmental impact assessment. Activities in areas beyond national jurisdiction that may cause substantial pollution or significant and harmful changes to the marine environment must be assessed before they proceed, with screening and scoping, notification, expert review and publication of the assessment.

The threshold questions are where the disputes will sit. Which activities are covered, and who determines whether effects are significant? How are cumulative and transboundary impacts handled? What happens when a flag state's assessment standard is lower than a coastal state's expectation, or when a contractor's existing licence was granted before the treaty's requirements applied? The treaty sets a process; it does not resolve every standard.

The second mechanism is area-based management, including marine protected areas. The Conference of the Parties can designate areas and adopt associated measures, with proposals typically originating from states parties and subject to consultation with existing bodies. For shipping, the practical questions concern routeing and traffic-separation measures that today sit with the International Maritime Organization. For fishing, they concern closures that regional fisheries bodies already adopt. For seabed contractors, they concern whether an area closed under the treaty coincides with an exploration or exploitation licence issued by the International Seabed Authority.

Benefit-sharing and marine genetic resources

The third mechanism covers marine genetic resources, including digital sequence information. Parties must notify the collection of samples, deposit material and sequence data in an open-access mechanism, and share benefits flowing from that material. Non-monetary benefits include capacity building, technology transfer and access to data. Monetary benefits are contemplated, but their modalities are left to the Conference of the Parties to decide.

For biotechnology, pharmaceutical, cosmetic and agricultural companies, and for universities entering research partnerships, this creates diligence questions upstream of product development: the provenance of samples, the terms of collaboration with foreign research institutions, the handling of sequence data, and whether contracts anticipate a benefit-sharing obligation whose formula does not yet exist.

Marine insurers and their counsel face a related question — whether underwriting and claims assessments need to account for a new category of regulatory non-compliance, alongside the environmental and fisheries offences they already consider.

The overlap problem

The treaty does not displace the International Seabed Authority, regional fisheries management organisations or the IMO. It requires coordination and is drafted so as not to undermine existing instruments and frameworks. That is a political compromise, not an operating manual.

The consequence is that a single project may face a seabed authority environmental plan, a treaty assessment and consultation with a fisheries body on ecological impacts, each with different timing, evidentiary standards and reviewing institutions. Where standards diverge, operators must decide which governs their approvals, and regulators must decide who defers to whom. Neither question is answered in the text.

Why the first Conference of the Parties matters more than the text

The Conference of the Parties will adopt its rules of procedure, the modalities of assessment review, the process for designating protected areas, the institutional machinery such as a scientific and technical body and a clearing-house mechanism, and the monetary benefit-sharing decision. It will also define, in practice, how the treaty's institutions interact with existing bodies — the point on which most commercial uncertainty turns.

Dispute settlement follows the Convention on the Law of the Sea, meaning disputes over the treaty's interpretation and application may go to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Court of Justice or arbitration. Many ocean-sector commercial disputes, however, are resolved in commercial arbitration or investor-state proceedings, which the treaty does not directly engage. How a tribunal should treat an allegation that a state breached its treaty obligations, and whether such an allegation is admissible in a commercial case, remains open.

For legal and compliance teams, the practical conclusion is that the treaty's entry into force is the beginning of a rule-making period rather than the end of one. The obligations that will shape permits, licences, contracts and insurance terms are the ones being written now — in the subsidiary bodies, the working groups and the first Conference of the Parties. Tracking that process, rather than waiting for the first enforcement action, is the more useful exercise.