Treaty Regime of Ocean Fertilization: gaps and solutions

Abstract

The international community has been trying to regulate ocean fertilization technology as a new geoengineering technique to deal with climate change for about a decade. During this period, some strategies have been proposed to govern such activities in the lack of a legal regime. These solutions have been mainly driven from the available treaties such as Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the London Dumping Regime. Although the availability of such solutions is so valuable, they do not fully represent the current situation. Such problem comes from ignoring the benefits of fertilization as one of the emerging technologies to deal with climate change, ambiguities existing in defining the critical concepts related to this technology, content inconsistency, and neglecting the position of private actors. Hence, in the present study, it is shown that the international community should attempt to set a specific document for the fertilization of the oceans, either partially or generally, to overcome such drawbacks. But, since such a process is so time-consuming, the capabilities of soft law can be used to regulate ocean fertilization activities. The application of soft law will be very helpful, especially in the current situation where the problems of ocean fertilization and their solutions are still unknown. Undoubtedly, the voluntary nature of soft law is highly likely to lead to more governments’ involvement. Furthermore, its flexibility allows non-state actors to participate. Accordingly, Data collection of this research is library method and the procedure is descriptive analytical