[Kasalikasan] Historic treaty defending excessive seas kicks off 2026

‘The treaty paves the best way for establishing marine protected areas in worldwide waters and for truthful and equitable benefit-sharing amongst nations’

A brand new 12 months is upon us, and with it comes a chunk of excellent information in a sector usually beleaguered by issues of every kind: a historic international treaty to safeguard biodiversity within the excessive seas got here into impact final January 17.

Generally known as the Settlement on Marine Organic Range of Areas Past Nationwide Jurisdiction (BBNJ Settlement), it supplies a legally binding international framework for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity within the excessive seas, contributing to a separate international dedication to guard 30% of the world’s biodiversity by 2030. As of this writing, solely 9.61% of it’s protected.

Archipelagic Philippines is a signatory to the BBNJ Settlement and ratified it final September. Again in 2024, throughout a world convention in Athens, the nation additionally talked about an preliminary roadmap that projected an space protection of 18.5% of terrestrial and 16% of marine protected areas.

However why does this excessive seas treaty matter? Amy Swift and Tom Pickerell of the World Sources Institute wrote: “With no binding international treaty, the excessive seas have been ruled patchwork model by means of regional fisheries agreements, transport conventions, and scattered marine protected areas which cowl lower than 1% of the excessive seas. This leaves essential gaps in defending marine biodiversity and guaranteeing that growing international locations additionally profit from discoveries made in worldwide waters.”

Briefly, the treaty paves the best way for establishing marine protected areas in worldwide waters and for truthful and equitable benefit-sharing amongst nations.

It’s a welcome improvement, particularly at a time when protected areas are below siege — in the USA, which “helped form the textual content” however hasn’t ratified the excessive seas treaty, and has even withdrawn from the UN Oceans; and within the Philippines, the place protected areas should not spared from unchecked developments.

Talking of unchecked developments, if you happen to missed Iya Gozum’s story final December on how a luxurious resort in pristine Siargao with hyperlinks to an area political clan reclaimed land in a protected space, there’s an replace: this month, the Philippine Reclamation Authority stated it’s going to examine the reclamation. We wait with bated breath, figuring out how a lot injury reclamations have triggered in numerous components of the nation.

One other story (or video) you might have missed through the holidays from our cluster: John Sitchon’s documentary on the dual disasters that plagued Cebu province in the previous few months of 2025. John is overlaying one other catastrophe in Cebu Metropolis, this time, man-made: the lethal landfill collapse in Barangay Binaliw that killed at the least 36 individuals, a lot of them waste employees. Town is now below a state of calamity.

After which there’s the Mayon unrest, which has displaced hundreds of residents residing inside the volcano’s six-kilometer everlasting hazard zone. Reinnard Balonzo is monitoring updates from the bottom.

2026 has been off to an eventful begin, to say the least.

Listed below are different tales from our cluster that you simply shouldn’t miss:

– Rappler.com

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