Between Australia and New Zealand sits a chain of underwater volcanoes that are home to an abundance of fish, ancient corals and other marine life.
Known as Lord Howe Rise, the vast underwater landscape largely exists outside state maritime boundaries, beneath the high seas.
That makes the ecologically-rich habitat fair game for industrial fishing, including long-lining and bottom-trawling techniques in the spotlight following the latest instalment from acclaimed nature documentarian David Attenborough.
Footage in Ocean powerfully reveals to viewers for the first time, trawlers dragging heavy nets across the sea bed in an indiscriminate search for just a few prized species.
As well as scooping up vast volumes of bycatch, such trawling has been found to churn up carbon that would have otherwise stayed locked in place on the sea floor, some of which ends up in the atmosphere to fuel climate change.
The documentary lands ahead of a major United Nations ocean conference in France in June.
Conservation groups are hopeful the film will help garner support for a landmark treaty to better protect the roughly two-thirds of marine habitat outside the boundaries of individual countries.
The high seas biodiversity agreement would lay the foundations to safeguard 30 per cent of the world’s oceans by 2030 in marine sanctuaries, helping preserve threatened species and support fish stocks for communities reliant on the food source.
According to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Australia, a founding signatory to the agreement in 2023, and the re-elected Albanese government have promised to ratify its commitment “as quickly as possible”.
“Australia is one of a small number of countries that requires implementing legislation to be in place before the treaty can be ratified,” a spokesperson says.
A multi-agency government delegation still being finalised is set to attend to conference in France.
To bring the treaty into force, 60 countries need to enshrine the treaty in national law via ratification.
So far, about 40 have either done so or signalled that they will.
WWF-Australia head of oceans and sustainable development Richard Leck is confident the treaty will come into force.
“But it means countries like Australia, who have indicated they support the treaty, really need to step up to their parliamentary processes and make sure that that actually gets through their systems,” he says.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific senior oceans campaigner Georgia Whittaker says marine animals are being “pushed closer to the brink of extinction” every day that passes without stronger protections.
Fresh analysis of fisheries data from the environmental campaigners reveals damage caused by industrial longline fishing – long stretches of baited hooks – to shark populations.
Almost half a million near-threatened blue sharks were taken as bycatch in the the central and western Pacific in 2023, the highest number ever recorded and double 2015 numbers.
Greenpeace has been angling for a marine sanctuary in the Lord Howe Rise and Tasman Sea region in anticipation of the oceans treaty going ahead.
Marine scientist and Research Connect Blue director Rachel Przeslawski says there is still much to learn about the diverse underwater tracts off Australia’s east coast.
The mighty chain of seamounts – underwater mountains – experience an inverse relationship to biodiversity to that of their on-land cousins.
Life is most abundant higher on the peaks, where there’s more sunlight and nutrients, with visiting humpback whales and other migratory species among the creatures found in their midst.
The deeper waters of the surrounding abyssal plains tend to host sparser populations of “weird critters” that have adapted to dark, nutrient-poor and hostile conditions.
Some seamounts are as shallow as 200m and a few breach the surface, Lord Howe Island and Middleton and Elizabeth reefs among them.
Australian trawlers are no longer active in the area but vessels from other countries are causing damage, Dr Przeslawski tells AAP, with sea beds taking years or even decades to recover.
She says any marine sanctuaries devised under a high seas agreement would ideally be completely no-take.
Many existing marine parks are only partially protected, with permitted sections to be fished or mined.
“Is it going to be toothless?” Dr Przeslawski asks.
“Or will it actually have some bite and the ability to affect some of these really ecologically damaging activities?”
Written by: Poppy Johnston (AAP)
