Ocean Policy: An Overview.

Introduction

Ocean policy in both the United States and the wider global community represents an effort to balance limited resources with the needs of a growing human population. Ocean policy deals with political boundaries, fishing and mineral extraction rights, navigation rights, and undersea mining claims. As fisheries become overexploited and fossil fuel reserves are depleted, international competition for the remaining resources intensifies. Additionally, security concerns motivate some countries to place their territorial waters off-limits to foreign shipping interests.

In the United States, protection of marine resources has been complicated by many regulatory agencies with overlapping areas of responsibility. Despite government efforts, many challenges to marine ecosystems to remain, including declining fish stocks, pollution, and climate change.

Understanding the Discussion

Navigation rights: Legal protections for oceangoing vessels to move peacefully from one point to another through a nation's territorial waters. Security concerns among nations adjoining strategic straits must be addressed when negotiating navigation rights. In the Law of the Sea treaty, navigation rights are also extended to aircraft based on oceangoing vessels. Maintenance of submarine cables and undersea pipelines is also allowed under the agreement.

Overexploited fisheries: Commercially valuable marine species that are harvested at a rate exceeding their maximum rate of reproduction. In interconnected marine ecosystems, species depend upon one another for survival, so overexploitation of one species may drive others to extinction. Fisheries that are considered fully exploited are being harvested at a rate equal to their “recruitment” or reproduction rate.

Territorial sea limit: An offshore boundary claimed by a coastal nation. Within the limit, foreign interests are prohibited from extracting living or nonliving resources. Territorial sea limits allow countries to deal with security concerns as well as manage fisheries for sustainable harvests.

United Nations (UN): An international organization that facilitates cooperation in international law, security, economic development, and social justice. The UN was founded after the end of World War II and now counts almost every independent country as a member. Its headquarters is in New York City.

History

Nations have long recognized that territorial claims over the ocean could be profitable. In 1494, shortly after Christopher Columbus returned from the Americas, representatives from Spain and Portugal met with Pope Alexander VI. Their discussion of territorial claims to the Atlantic Ocean resulted in a papal bull (written pronouncement) decreeing that Spain owned half the Atlantic Ocean and Portugal the other half.

Defending that claim proved impossible, as coastal nations discovered they could only claim that which they had the power to defend. National territorial sea limits date from the eighteenth century and were originally based on the three-mile distance that cannons could fire from the shore.

Since then, coastal countries have expanded their territorial boundaries to secure offshore resources. By the 1960s, nations were claiming, on average, a twelve-mile territorial sea. These claims complicated navigation, as many straits and inland waterways fall within that limit. For example, the Strait of Gibraltar is the only entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Under the twelve-mile limit, international shipping in the Mediterranean would be threatened. For this reason, countries with shipping interests insisted on a three-mile territorial sea limit.

International conflict over territorial sea limits is also based on competition over the seafood harvest. Territorial sea limit expansions are often opposed by neighboring states. In the 1958–76 Cod Wars, Iceland and Great Britain clashed over Iceland's expansion of its marine boundaries. No shots were fired, but the conflict did involve ship rammings and many cut fishing nets before an agreement was reached in 1976.

Pressure on fish stocks has increased along with the world's human population. According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), over 34.8 million tons of fish were harvested from the world's oceans in 1960. That figure peaked at 95.2 million tons in 1996 and largely leveled off. By the mid-to-late 2010s, about 90 percent of fish stocks were either fully exploited or overexploited. The human population continues to increase, while fish, contending with pollution and warming water temperatures, are at their limit.

Destructive fishing methods have added additional stress on marine ecosystems. For example, bottom trawling is a common fishing method in which giant weighted nets are dragged along the seafloor, destroying reefs and devastating ecosystems; however, over 95 percent of the catch consists of unwanted species, which are killed but never used. Individual and corporate fishers have been driven by economic pressures to use this and other similarly destructive fishing methods because they produce a quick harvest with little labor.

In an attempt to address ocean problems, the United Nations established the Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1982. Initially, the administration of President Ronald Reagan did not sign the treaty due to concerns about some provisions regarding deep-sea mining. In 1994, the treaty was altered to address those concerns and established “exclusive economic zones” extending two hundred miles offshore from each coastal nation, protecting resources within these boundaries from foreign fleets. UNCLOS also established provisions for freedom of navigation, the conservation of marine life, and pollution control. By January 2024, 169 countries had acceded to or ratified the treaty, while another thirteen, including the United States, had signed the agreement but not yet ratified it. The United States does abide by most of its terms, and periodically, lawmakers attempt to bring UNCLOS ratification to a vote. A 2012 effort to do so was stymied by more than thirty senators, however.

Some opponents of UNCLOS view it as an attempt by the United Nations to transfer wealth and technology from developed countries to developing and communist ones. It is also argued that the treaty would subjugate the United States to the United Nations, enabling the UN to levy taxes on private enterprises and national governments.

Supporters of the treaty counter that mandatory technology transfers were eliminated in the 1994 version. Proponents also argue that the treaty strengthens US sovereignty over large areas of territory, enabling full mobility for ships and aircraft. They further contend that the taxes in question are actually small revenue-sharing provisions for cases of deep-sea mining outside any country's territorial sea limit.

In response to what the UN termed a “crisis in world fisheries,” Congress passed the Oceans Act of 2000, which established the US Committee on Ocean Policy in 2004. After three years of work, the committee returned a report outlining two hundred recommendations for overcoming challenges to the oceans, Great Lakes, and coasts. Recommendations included the ratification of the UNCLOS pollution controls, controls on coastal development, increased funding for research and education in ocean science, and establishment of a National Ocean Policy Framework to provide coordinated leadership. The committee estimated that it would cost US$1.5 billion to implement its recommendations in the first year, but that the cost would later be recouped with improved ecosystem productivity.

In an effort to protect marine resources, in 2006 President George W. Bush established the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, which protected 4,500 square miles of coral reef. His successor, President Barack Obama, would later incorporate it into the 582,578-square-mile Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the world's widest such protected area. He also designated the 4,913-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, the first marine national monument in the Atlantic.

Attempts to protect declining fish stocks have met with delay or resistance, so fisheries continue to be overexploited. In November 2006, a coalition of fishing nations blocked a UN ban on trawling. Although the destructive nature of trawling is not in question, economic pressures induce nations to harvest fish by any means possible.

US president Barack Obama ordered the formation of an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force in June 2009. The following July, after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, he issued an executive order to adopt the task force's recommendations. That order also created a National Ocean Council and established ecosystem-based guidelines for fish and oil and gas development. This constituted the first National Ocean Policy focused on environmental concerns. Many fishers criticized the executive order, however, saying it did not allow for enough participation of fishers in the establishment of new ocean policy regulations.

The administration of President Donald Trump, a former business mogul, contrasted greatly, prioritizing natural resource extraction and economic growth over environmental considerations. Critics feared Trump's revised 2018 National Ocean Policy would both hamper cooperation between the federal and state governments and ignore Indigenous peoples, who had gained unprecedented representation in marine policymaking under the earlier policy. It also opened the possibility that commercial fishing would be allowed in the Pacific Remote Islands, Rose Atoll, and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments.

That same year, the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations issued an Ocean Plastics Charter to combat marine plastics pollution. However, the Trump administration declined to sign onto that agreement.

Ocean Policy Today

The early 2020s saw renewed attention given to several ocean-policy related issues, including deep-sea mining, territorial sea limits, and freedom of navigation. As increasing access to rare-earth metals became a pressing concern in electric vehicle manufacturing—widely seen as crucial to climate change mitigation—the prospect of deep-sea mining and its attendant risks took on greater urgency. In late 2023, the United States officially announced the boundaries of its extended continental shelf (ECS) two hundred nautical miles (nm) into the Arctic Ocean. The two-decade-long mapping of the ECS asserted the country's territorial rights under UNCLOS and culminated during a period of intense interest in that resource-rich area.

Around that same time, several US senators revived calls to ratify UNCLOS in order for the United States to weigh in on the International Seabed Authority (ISA) rule-making for deep-sea mining. Another factor at play was intense, ongoing competition with China. However, due to domestic concerns, that ratification effort gained little traction in the US Senate.

Freedom of navigation has been another point of geopolitical contention. In the 2010s and 2020s, the US military also engaged in joint exercises with Asian allies the Philippines and Taiwan to counter aggressive maneuvers by China and ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. In late 2023, the administration of President Joe Biden authorized airstrikes against Yemeni rebels who were striking US warships and passing cargo ships in the Red Sea with drones during the Israel-Hamas conflict and thus hindering international shipping and oil operations.

Climate change and biodiversity loss have also become significant sources of concern for marine environments. Under the Biden administration, the United States laid out an Ocean Climate Action Plan, setting carbon neutrality, prioritizing nature-based solutions, and improved resiliency through marine solutions as major goals. The United Nations also concluded a High Seas Treaty on biodiversity in international waters in March 2023. That landmark treaty sought to protect international deep waters outside national jurisdictions.

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