Exploitation of the high seas risks doing irreversible damage to biodiversity, climate stability and ocean equity. A consensus must be built now to save them.

Given the urgency of addressing the climate and biodiversity crises, the world can’t wait another decade to fix the problems humans have created. Ocean life is too precious and important to lose, and shifts in the chemical and physical environments of the sea, once made, will be irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.