Ocean Governance Masterclass: The High Seas Treaty, 30x30, and Nature Disclosure

Why ocean governance changed structurally in this decade

For most of the modern history of international law, roughly two-thirds of the ocean by area — everything beyond the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones that coastal states control — existed in a governance gap. Areas beyond national jurisdiction were subject to a patchwork of sector-specific agreements covering shipping, fishing, and seabed minerals separately, but no single comprehensive framework governed the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity across the high seas as a whole. Three developments now close that gap and, taken together, form a new operating framework that businesses and governments need to understand as a system rather than as three unrelated agreements: the BBNJ High Seas Treaty, the Kunming-Montreal 30x30 target, and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).

Each addresses a different layer of the same underlying problem — how to manage human activity's impact on nature at a scale and in locations where no single national authority has jurisdiction, or where the impact of a company's activity on nature was previously invisible to its own financial reporting. Read separately, each looks like a technical instrument for specialists. Read together, they describe a coherent shift: nature, including the parts of nature no country owns, is becoming something governments plan around explicitly and companies are expected to account for explicitly.

The BBNJ High Seas Treaty: a framework for the ungoverned two-thirds

The Agreement under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction — known by its working shorthand, BBNJ, or more commonly the High Seas Treaty — was agreed in 2023 and entered into force in January 2026. It is the first comprehensive legal framework specifically governing marine life in the high seas and the international seabed area, the parts of the ocean that fall outside any single nation's exclusive economic zone.

The treaty is built around four operational pillars, each addressing a distinct gap in prior high seas governance.

Marine protected areas on the high seas. Before BBNJ, there was no mechanism for establishing legally binding marine protected areas that covered high seas waters comprehensively — existing high seas protections were fragmented across regional fisheries bodies and sector-specific agreements, each with limited scope and no shared designation process. BBNJ creates a process for parties to propose, assess, and designate area-based management tools, including marine protected areas, on the high seas, along with a conference of parties and scientific body to evaluate proposals and monitor outcomes over time.

Environmental impact assessment. The treaty establishes a requirement that activities planned in areas beyond national jurisdiction, or activities under a state's jurisdiction that could have a significant effect on the marine environment beyond that jurisdiction, undergo environmental impact assessment before proceeding. This closes a structural gap: an activity conducted entirely within a state's territorial control but affecting the high seas previously fell outside any binding assessment requirement specific to that transboundary effect.

Benefit-sharing of marine genetic resources. Marine organisms found in the deep sea and other high seas environments are an active area of bioprospecting — organisms adapted to extreme pressure, cold, and darkness have yielded compounds of interest to pharmaceutical, industrial enzyme, and biotechnology research. Prior to BBNJ, no framework governed how the benefits of research and commercialisation based on high seas genetic material should be shared, since the material itself is not owned by any single state. BBNJ establishes access and benefit-sharing obligations, including provisions on monetary and non-monetary benefit-sharing and on making sequence information related to marine genetic resources more broadly accessible for research.

Capacity-building and technology transfer. The treaty includes obligations to support developing states in participating meaningfully in high seas science, monitoring, and governance — recognising that the scientific and technical capacity to survey and monitor the high seas is unevenly distributed globally, and that a governance framework only functions if states can actually observe and enforce it.

Operationally, BBNJ matters to any organisation whose activity touches the high seas — deep-sea cable-laying, marine scientific research, bioprospecting, or shipping routes that intersect proposed protected areas — because environmental impact assessment obligations and area-based restrictions are now binding treaty law rather than voluntary best practice, for parties to the agreement.

Kunming-Montreal 30x30: what "protect 30%" means operationally

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, includes a headline target commonly referred to as 30x30: effectively conserve and manage at least 30 percent of the world's land, inland waters, and coastal and marine areas by 2030.

The target is frequently cited as a single number, but its operational meaning is more specific than the shorthand suggests, and the specifics matter for anyone planning around it.

"Effectively conserved and managed," not simply designated. The target language emphasises effective conservation, not merely the administrative act of drawing a boundary on a map. A marine protected area that exists on paper but lacks enforcement capacity, monitoring, or a management plan does not straightforwardly count toward meaningful progress, even where it counts toward the raw percentage figure — a distinction that has become a significant point of technical debate in tracking global progress toward the target.

Including areas managed by indigenous peoples and local communities. The framework explicitly recognises conservation achieved through indigenous and community-led management, alongside formally designated protected areas, as a legitimate route to the target — reflecting an evidence base showing indigenous-managed lands and waters frequently maintain biodiversity outcomes comparable to or better than formally protected areas.

A connected-system logic, not just an area quota. The framework's broader text emphasises ecological connectivity and representativeness across ecosystem types, not simply hitting 30 percent of total area anywhere convenient. A protection portfolio concentrated entirely in remote, low-conflict, low-value areas achieves the percentage without achieving the ecological or economic-planning purpose the target is meant to serve.

For the ocean specifically, 30x30 interacts directly with BBNJ: the treaty provides the first practical legal mechanism for designating high seas marine protected areas at meaningful scale, which is necessary infrastructure for reaching a marine conservation target that spans both national waters and the high seas. Prior to BBNJ, roughly two-thirds of the ocean by area had no comprehensive mechanism for formal protected-area designation at all — meaning 30x30's marine component was structurally reliant on a legal instrument that did not yet exist. The two frameworks are sequenced by design: BBNJ supplies the legal tool, 30x30 supplies the target the tool is meant to help achieve.

For governments, 30x30 operationalises into national biodiversity strategy and action plan updates, marine spatial planning processes, and — increasingly — coordination with fisheries and shipping-lane planning to reconcile new protected areas with existing economic activity. For businesses with marine-adjacent operations (shipping, offshore energy, fisheries, coastal tourism, subsea infrastructure), 30x30 is best treated as a planning input: an expanding footprint of areas where activity will require additional assessment, restriction, or exclusion over the remainder of the decade, and where early engagement with national marine spatial planning processes is more useful than treating each new designation as a surprise.

TNFD: bringing nature onto the balance sheet of attention

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures is a framework, modelled structurally on the climate-focused Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), that gives organisations a standardised structure for assessing and disclosing how their operations depend on nature and impact nature.

TNFD organises disclosure around four pillars, mirroring the TCFD structure: governance (how the organisation oversees nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities), strategy (how these factors affect the organisation's business model and strategy over time), risk and impact management (the processes used to identify, assess, and manage nature-related risks), and metrics and targets (the specific indicators used to measure and track performance).

The analytical core of TNFD is the LEAP approach — Locate, Evaluate, Assess, Prepare — a recommended process for organisations to work through their interface with nature systematically: locating where the organisation interfaces with nature across its direct operations and value chain, evaluating dependencies and impacts at those locations, assessing the resulting risks and opportunities, and preparing to respond through strategy and disclosure.

For ocean-relevant sectors specifically, TNFD is directly material. A shipping company depends on stable ocean conditions and predictable port and coastal infrastructure; a fisheries or aquaculture operation depends directly on marine ecosystem health as a production input; a coastal tourism operation depends on reef, beach, and water-quality conditions; an offshore energy operator's impact on seabed habitats and marine mammal migration routes is a direct impact channel requiring assessment. TNFD does not invent new obligations to protect the ocean — it invents a structured obligation to know and disclose how ocean health already runs through the organisation's dependencies and impacts, in language investors, insurers, and regulators can compare across companies and sectors.

The disclosure trend TNFD represents is consistent with the trajectory climate disclosure took after TCFD's introduction: initially voluntary, adopted first by leading organisations seeking to signal risk-management maturity to investors, then increasingly referenced or required by regulators and stock exchanges as the framework matures and becomes the default expectation rather than a differentiator.

How the three interlock

The three frameworks are not independent tracks; they form a single operational logic when read together.

BBNJ supplies the legal infrastructure for protecting biodiversity in the roughly two-thirds of the ocean previously outside any comprehensive governance framework — the high seas. Kunming-Montreal 30x30 supplies the quantitative target that infrastructure is meant to help achieve, spanning both national waters and the newly governable high seas. TNFD supplies the private-sector accounting layer that connects both public frameworks to corporate decision-making: an organisation cannot meaningfully assess its nature-related risk in ocean-adjacent operations without understanding where 30x30-driven marine spatial planning and BBNJ-enabled protected areas are likely to expand, and a government cannot design an effective national marine spatial plan without understanding where private-sector economic activity and its nature dependencies are concentrated.

Practically, this interlock means the three frameworks should inform a single planning exercise rather than three separate compliance checklists. A government developing its national biodiversity strategy and action plan under 30x30 needs to know which high seas areas adjacent to its waters are candidates for BBNJ-enabled protected area designation, and which domestic sectors' TNFD disclosures reveal concentrated nature dependency that marine spatial planning should account for. A company assessing its TNFD disclosure obligations needs to understand which of its operating locations sit within, adjacent to, or upstream of areas likely to gain protected status under 30x30 or BBNJ processes, since that materially changes both physical operating risk and future regulatory risk.

What this means for business and government planning

For governments, particularly those with significant coastal and maritime economic zones, the practical sequence is: update or prepare national biodiversity strategy and action plans against the 30x30 target with explicit reference to marine components; engage with BBNJ's institutional processes — conference of parties, scientific and technical body — to shape how high seas protected area designation interacts with national waters and adjacent economic activity; and consider how national sustainability or financial regulation might reference or require TNFD-aligned disclosure from ocean-dependent sectors, following the precedent set by climate disclosure regulation over the preceding decade.

For businesses in ocean-adjacent sectors — shipping, offshore energy, fisheries, aquaculture, coastal tourism, subsea cable and infrastructure, marine biotechnology — the practical sequence is: conduct a LEAP-style assessment of nature dependencies and impacts across direct operations and supply chain; map operating and planned activity against existing and proposed marine protected areas, including anticipated high seas designations under BBNJ; and treat TNFD-aligned disclosure as an emerging baseline expectation rather than a discretionary reporting exercise, given the regulatory trajectory climate disclosure has already established as precedent.

For organisations operating in or through the Gulf specifically, the region's active marine spatial planning, mangrove and blue carbon programs, and growing engagement with international biodiversity and ocean governance processes make early alignment with all three frameworks a lower-cost, higher-credibility path than retrofitting disclosure and planning processes after requirements harden.

Monitoring, enforcement, and the data gap

None of the three frameworks function without the capacity to actually observe what is happening in the areas and activities they govern, and this observational capacity is the least discussed but most operationally important constraint on all three.

BBNJ's environmental impact assessment obligations and its area-based management tools are only as effective as the monitoring infrastructure available to detect non-compliance across an ocean area too vast for routine physical inspection. Satellite-based vessel tracking, already used extensively for fisheries enforcement, is the most scalable monitoring layer available for high seas activity, but coverage gaps remain for vessels that disable tracking transponders or for impacts — such as effects on deep-sea genetic resources or seabed habitats — that are not visible from surface-level tracking at all.

30x30's "effectively conserved and managed" standard similarly depends on monitoring capacity that is unevenly distributed globally. A protected area designation without a funded management authority, monitoring program, and enforcement mechanism risks becoming what practitioners sometimes describe as a paper park — a designation that satisfies the area quota without delivering the ecological outcome the target is meant to produce. Tracking genuine progress toward 30x30, as distinct from tracking the raw percentage of designated area, requires independently verified management-effectiveness assessment, which is a slower and more resource-intensive process than area designation itself.

TNFD disclosure quality depends on organisations having reliable underlying data about their own operations' location-specific nature dependencies and impacts — data that, for many companies, particularly those with extended and geographically dispersed supply chains, does not yet exist in a form suitable for rigorous LEAP-based assessment. Early TNFD adopters have generally found the locate and evaluate stages of the LEAP process to be the most resource-intensive, precisely because building a reliable operational map of nature interfaces is a data infrastructure project in its own right, not simply a reporting exercise layered on existing data.

For governments and organisations planning around these frameworks, this means monitoring and data infrastructure investment should be treated as a prerequisite alongside — not an afterthought to — policy and disclosure commitments. A national biodiversity strategy, a corporate TNFD disclosure, or a BBNJ-aligned high seas protected area proposal is only as credible as the data supporting it.

Three Scenarios → 2050

🟢 Best path: BBNJ's institutional processes mature quickly, high seas marine protected areas are designated at meaningful scale with real enforcement capacity, 30x30 is reached with effectively managed area rather than paper designations, and TNFD-aligned disclosure becomes standard practice across ocean-dependent sectors — giving governments and businesses a shared, transparent picture of where economic activity and marine biodiversity protection need to be reconciled, updated continuously as conditions change.

🟡 Middle path: Progress is real but uneven — some regions and sectors adopt all three frameworks rigorously while others treat them as minimum-compliance exercises. High seas protected areas are designated more slowly than the 2030 target implies, and TNFD disclosure quality varies widely across companies claiming adoption, producing a governance layer that exists everywhere on paper but functions unevenly in practice.

🔴 Slow path: BBNJ ratification and institutional build-out stalls, 30x30 is met mostly through paper designations that lack management capacity, and TNFD remains a niche practice among a small set of leading disclosers rather than a sector-wide norm — leaving the high seas governance gap only partially closed and nature-related financial risk still largely invisible in most corporate decision-making.

What You Can Do

• If your organisation has ocean-adjacent operations, commission a LEAP-style nature dependency and impact assessment as a first step toward TNFD-aligned disclosure.
• Map current and planned operations against existing marine protected areas and known 30x30 national biodiversity strategy priorities in your operating jurisdictions.
• Track BBNJ conference-of-parties outcomes as high seas protected area proposals move through the treaty's institutional process, particularly where they intersect shipping routes or subsea infrastructure your organisation relies on.
• For government or policy teams, evaluate how national biodiversity strategy and action plan updates under 30x30 can explicitly reference BBNJ-enabled high seas mechanisms rather than treating national and high seas planning as separate exercises.
• Treat TNFD adoption now as a credibility investment ahead of likely future regulatory reference, rather than waiting for disclosure to become mandatory.