中文
By Fabien Pacory
The U.N. High Seas Treaty took effect in January, and three cities are now competing to host its permanent secretariat. Xiamen has the best case.
When the clock struck midnight on Jan. 17, 2026, the United Nations Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement) became binding international law.
Often called the "High Seas Treaty," the new instrument covers roughly half the planet and two-thirds of the ocean surface, the water columns and deep seabeds that until now lay largely outside any comprehensive conservation regime. It crossed the 60-ratification threshold years ahead of pessimistic forecasts and well below the 12 years the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) itself took to enter into force.
The BBNJ Agreement is only the third implementing treaty under UNCLOS and the first in more than three decades to extend the law of the sea into a new environmental frontier.
The culmination of nearly two decades of multilateral negotiation, it is the first legally binding framework to govern the two-thirds of the ocean beyond any single nation's territorial reach. With 93 parties and counting, the treaty establishes rules for marine genetic resources, area-based management tools including marine protected areas, environmental impact assessments, and the transfer of marine technology to developing states. It closes a critical governance gap that has left the high seas vulnerable to overexploitation, pollution and climate change.
An aerial panoramic drone photo taken on Jan. 24, 2024 shows Yundang Lake and its surroundings in Xiamen, southeast China's Fujian Province. [Photo by Jiang Kehong/Xinhua]
As the international community turns from negotiation to implementation, a decisive question looms: where will the permanent secretariat be headquartered? Three cities have emerged as contenders: Valparaiso, Brussels and Xiamen.
China's formal bid, submitted on Jan. 16, 2026, one day before the agreement took effect, carries symbolic weight. It is not merely a real estate offer; it is a statement of intent that integrates China's domestic ecological achievements, its vision of a maritime community with a shared future and its practical capacity to host a global governance hub into one coherent proposition.
From vision to vessel: A maritime community with a shared future
In 2019, China proposed building a maritime community with a shared future, describing the blue planet as "not divided into islands by the oceans, but connected by the oceans to form a community with a shared future, where people of all countries share weal and woe." The vision has become the philosophical anchor of China's ocean policy. It upholds multilateralism, respects the U.N.-centered international system and holds that maritime order should be underpinned by international law rather than unilateral power.
The BBNJ Agreement itself was significantly guided by the principles of the maritime community with a shared future, according to Chinese legal scholars. The treaty's emphasis on equitable benefit-sharing from marine genetic resources, capacity-building for developing nations and collective stewardship of the high seas mirrors China's call for "wide consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits."
Hosting the secretariat in Xiamen would therefore be a natural extension of a principle China has already helped embed in the treaty text, signaling that the Asia-Pacific region is not merely a stakeholder in high-seas governance but a central architect of its future.
Proven stewardship: China's marine conservation record
China's candidacy is backed by concrete ecological achievements at home and abroad. Domestically, the country has pursued large-scale coastal restoration with measurable results. In Xiamen, the Xiatanwei Mangrove Coastal Wetland Ecological Park stands as a testament to deliberate ecological renewal: since 2005 the city has planted about 85 hectares of mangroves, creating a natural buffer against typhoons while restoring nursery habitats for marine life.
In Tong'an Bay, authorities removed more than 200 million cubic meters of silt from tidal flats around 2015, reviving seagrass beds and benthic ecosystems, a model later adopted by African nations for coastal governance. China's broader Beautiful Bay Initiative has reduced land-based pollution and expanded marine protected areas along its 18,000-kilometer coastline.
Beyond its shores, China has built joint maritime research centers with the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan and Tanzania, and assisted Nigeria, Mozambique, Seychelles and Madagascar in continental-shelf scientific research. The China-Africa Marine Science and Blue Economy Cooperation Center has trained marine scientists and shared ocean-observation data across the continent. China's "Blue Circle" marine-plastic recycling initiative, launched in 2020 and awarded the U.N.'s highest environmental honor in 2023, shows how Chinese innovation can tackle transboundary marine pollution at scale.
China has continued to advance this approach in international forums. At the 2025 U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, China was represented by a substantial scientific delegation that included the Zhanjiang Chinese White Dolphin Protection and Conservation Foundation, reflecting the country's growing engagement in international marine conservation. China used the conference to call for an ocean that is peaceful, clean, sustainable and beneficial to all, and to press for multilateralism and support for developing countries.
These efforts reflect a systematic approach to "human-ocean harmony" that integrates blue-carbon development, green-port construction and integrated bay management, precisely the multidisciplinary expertise the BBNJ secretariat will need.
Xiamen: A garden city with institutional depth
Xiamen is more than a scenic coastal destination. Its bid rests on a dense, decades-old marine science ecosystem suited to an instrument built around area-based conservation, genetic resources and capacity-building.
Xiamen University hosts the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science and has been a consistent convener of international ocean science gatherings, including a special forum feeding into the U.N. Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) and successive symposia on marine environmental science that have drawn researchers from across the Asia-Pacific.
The Third Institute of Oceanography of China's Ministry of Natural Resources, also based in Xiamen, houses the Key Laboratory of Marine Ecological Protection and Restoration and has a strong tradition in marine biological genetic resources and biodiversity conservation, fields directly relevant to BBNJ implementation.
The city has hosted the annual World Ocean Week since 2005 and has convened forums such as the APEC Blue Economy Forum, giving it deep experience in managing the kind of international gatherings the secretariat will organize.
Xiamen's offer is therefore not merely a matter of diplomatic prestige. It would anchor the BBNJ secretariat inside an ecosystem that already works on the same questions the agreement sets out to answer. China also has a record of rapidly translating multilateral commitments into domestic action, writing a biodiversity chapter into the 2023 Marine Environment Protection Law and building out a network of more than 300 marine protected areas. That positions the city as a bridge between the agreement's negotiating table and its operational floor, and as a standing platform for South-South and Asia-Pacific capacity-building.
A shared horizon
The ocean covers 71% of the planet's surface and more than 40% of humanity lives within 200 kilometers of the coast, so the stakes of governing areas beyond national jurisdiction are universal. About 8.2% of the ocean is under some form of protection and just 2.9% is considered fully or highly protected, which makes the BBNJ Agreement's central objective of establishing marine protected areas directly relevant to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's "30 by 30" target.
The agreement's entry into force is a rare reaffirmation that multilateral law can still rise to existential environmental challenges. Hosting the secretariat in Xiamen would place that reaffirmation inside one of the world's most dynamic marine research hubs and would convert the maritime community with a shared future from slogan into sustained institutional presence. For a treaty born of two decades of negotiation, what happens in Xiamen will help determine whether its promise is fulfilled.
If selected, Xiamen would become one of the few U.N.-affiliated headquarters in the Asia-Pacific, correcting a long-standing geographical imbalance in ocean governance institutions.
Anchoring the future in shared waters
The BBNJ Agreement represents a triumph of multilateralism at a moment when multilateralism itself is under strain. The choice of secretariat host will signal whether the international community is prepared to distribute global governance responsibilities equitably. China's bid for Xiamen is grounded in a demonstrated record of marine restoration, a principled commitment to the U.N.-centered maritime order, and the institutional and financial capacity to ensure the treaty's success.
As the world implements the "30 by 30" target to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, the BBNJ secretariat will be the operational heart of that ambition on the high seas. There is a compelling logic in placing that heart in a city that has spent two decades proving that rapid development and ecological restoration can proceed in tandem, and in a country that has framed its entire maritime foreign policy around the idea that the ocean belongs to all humanity. Xiamen is ready. The question is whether the world is ready to share the future it claims to believe in.
Fabien Pacory is executive vice president of the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry in China.
