On 23 March 2026, Australia’s Senate passed the High Seas Biodiversity Bill. Your support made this possible. This is your win. Thank you. You’ve been with us through the long road and we don’t take that lightly.
The Australian government has finally brought the Global Ocean Treaty into law – this means we are one step closer to creating ocean sanctuaries here at home.
You backed this when a lot of people said it couldn’t happen. Whether you first supported Greenpeace last month or ten years ago, you were part of something historic. That Australia would one day stand up for the 64% of the world’s ocean that belongs to no country, and was protected by almost nothing.
© Greenpeace / BRIDGET FERGUSON
What your support made possible
64%
of the world’s ocean now covered by this historic treaty
20 yrs
of campaigning and supporters like you who never gave up
30%
of oceans to be protected by 2030, the goal your support is driving
What you actually changed
The Global Ocean Treaty is the most significant ocean protection agreement in a generation, and it needed Australia. Not just as a signature. As a force
We have one of the largest ocean territories on earth. When Australia speaks in international negotiations, it matters. When we ratify, we don’t just add our name to a list. We shift what’s possible for ocean governance globally. We make it harder for those who want to mine, overfish and pollute the high seas to do so without consequence.
Before this treaty, less than 1% of the high seas had any protection. That’s the deep blue beyond every country’s border, home to humpback whales, migratory sharks, deep-sea corals, and millions of species we haven’t even named. It was an open frontier. Your support helped change that.
Because of you, the government heard a message it couldn’t ignore: this matters. Your donations, your petitions, your voice, they all added up to something real. The ocean wasn’t forgotten. Thank you for making sure of that.
— Greenpeace Australia Pacific Nature Team
A 20 year journey you helped drive
This win didn’t happen overnight. It took two decades of persistence and supporters who stayed with us through the slow, frustrating, unglamorous work of change.
What comes next?
Formal ratification will be completed in the coming months, but your support hasn’t just helped close a chapter. It’s opened the next one. Here’s what’s now possible because you showed up:
A Tasman Sea sanctuary, now possible
With ratification, Australia can nominate the Lord Howe Rise as one of the world’s first protected areas in international waters. Your support put this on the table.
Ocean COP 1, setting the rules
The first Conference of Parties meets later in 2026. Greenpeace will be there, pushing for the strongest possible protections. Funded by supporters like you.
30×30, the goal you’re helping achieve
Protecting 30% of oceans by 2030 is now within reach. Australia’s ratification is one of the most important steps toward that target.
Wildlife that can’t thank you, but we will
Humpback whales. Blue sharks. Deep-sea corals. Millions of species will have greater protection because you chose to act when it counted.
Today, the ocean belongs to you
Change like this doesn’t happen without people who decide to show up, through the slow years, the small actions, the moments when it was easy to walk away. You were one of those people, and we won’t forget it.
From all of us at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, and from the humpbacks, the sharks, the corals, and the deep-sea creatures who can’t say it themselves: thank you
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.