A proposal to end bottom trawling on seamounts in international waters by the end of 2027 was withdrawn during negotiations on the UN General Assembly’s Sustainable Fisheries Resolution, held in New York from 29 October to 6 November. Armenia, which tabled the language, pulled it after what the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC) describes as persistent opposition led by Japan. The coalition names the European Union, Russia, the United States and Australia among the other states against it, and the same list appears in World Fishing’s report.

According to the DSCC, Monaco, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Fiji, Vanuatu and Tuvalu supported the deadline. In the coalition’s account, Armenia withdrew the text rather than face a veto or amendments that would have emptied it.

A landlocked country is an unusual sponsor for a high-seas fishing measure. Armenia holds the presidency of the UN Biodiversity Conference, CBD COP17, which it hosted in Yerevan this autumn, and it had developed the seamount language with Monaco before the fisheries talks opened, according to the DSCC. The proposed wording called for phasing out bottom trawl fishing on seamounts in areas beyond national jurisdiction by 31 December 2027.

Some seamount language survived. The DSCC says the negotiated text kept a reference to a Convention on Migratory Species resolution and decision calling for seamounts to be protected from destructive fishing, and earlier General Assembly commitments on vulnerable marine ecosystems remain in force. The final resolution is expected to be made public when the General Assembly formally adopts it in December.

What lives on a seamount

Seamounts are underwater mountains, and a DSCC science brief estimates that seamounts and knolls together cover about 21 per cent of the global seafloor. Their slopes support corals and sponges, some of which take thousands of years to grow. A bottom trawl drags weighted nets and heavy ground gear across the seabed, and on a seamount it can strip that growth in a single pass. Dr Lissette Victorero, the DSCC’s scientific adviser, says studies of trawled seamounts find little evidence of recovery even decades after fishing stops.

More than 400 scientists have signed the Seamount Scientists Proclamation, launched at the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice by the DSCC, the Marine Conservation Institute and the International Programme on the State of the Ocean. Only 1.5 per cent of known seamounts are protected from bottom trawling, a figure ABC Pacific cited in its coverage of the talks.

The evidence of the destruction caused by bottom trawling is unequivocal, and governments have known about it for years.

Bronwen Golder, Seamounts Campaign Director, Deep Sea Conservation Coalition

The case for regional management

None of the opposing governments had published an explanation of its position at the time of writing. The argument fishing states have made in past rounds is that seamount protection belongs with the regional fisheries management organisations that set rules for each ocean area. When a global moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling was debated in 2005, Iceland said it preferred regional measures. In its submission to the UN Secretary-General’s 2026 report on bottom fishing, Japan described its work within the regional bodies its deep-sea fleet operates under and the annual seabed surveys it runs in the Emperor Seamounts of the North Pacific to identify vulnerable ecosystems.

Regional closures do exist. The coral in the photograph above sits on the New England Seamount Chain, where the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization closed its high-seas seamounts to bottom fishing from 2007 and amended the boundaries in 2022. The DSCC’s reply is that coverage elsewhere is patchy. It says New Zealand, Japan and the Cook Islands still authorise their vessels to bottom trawl on seamounts and ocean ridges on the high seas.

The General Assembly has been here before

A moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling failed at the UN in 2006, when fishing nations led by Iceland and Russia blocked a full ban. The compromise that came out of 2006, resolution 61/105, committed states and regional bodies to manage bottom fisheries so as to prevent significant harm to vulnerable marine ecosystems, including seamounts. Resolution 64/72 reinforced it in 2009, as the DSCC’s Matthew Gianni set out at a UN workshop in July. This year’s talks followed the latest UN review of how far states and regional bodies have implemented those commitments.

What comes next

After the December vote, the next venue is the first Conference of the Parties to the High Seas Treaty, formally the BBNJ Agreement, which runs from 11 to 22 January 2027 at UN Headquarters in New York. The DSCC says states that want high-seas biodiversity protected should hold the blocking governments to account there. The treaty entered into force on 17 January 2026, and the policy institute IDDRI expects governments to use the first conference to exchange views on early proposals for high-seas protected areas, alongside decisions on where the treaty’s secretariat will sit.

Read the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition’s statement on the withdrawn proposal.