The UN treaty on the high seas, signed in June, succeeded the fishing treaty, as an even more useful legal tool for protecting international waters. To date, all of the Arctic’s protected marine regions have been inside the 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of individual countries. The largest such protected area, designated in 2019, is Canada’s Tuvaijuittuq MPA, known as the Last Ice Area because it is expected to be the last Arctic place to have sea ice after the rest has melted.

Nevertheless, the movement to protect all of the Arctic Ocean – not just national waters – is gaining energy. The new high seas treaty still has to be ratified by the individual states, but it is no longer wishful thinking to imagine prohibiting activities such as oil and gas extraction, mining, bottom-contact trawling and dumping in international waters. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, tweeted recently: “This historic achievement is an example of global threats being met by global action.”

Taken together, the various individual measures and agencies could theoretically cover many of the direct threats to the Arctic Ocean and do away with the need for an all-encompassing MPA. But patchwork protection has downsides. Different treaties, negotiated separately, are weaker than a single umbrella treaty – particularly when it comes to anticipating and responding to new threats. There are “external” threats, too, such as acidification due to global heating, or the accumulation of pollutants that migrate into Arctic waters via the “grasshopper effect”.

The 90 North Foundation, is among those fostering that cooperation with the aim of trying to designate the entire middle of the Arctic Ocean a marine protected area (MPA).

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