Report | February 11, 2026
The Ocean Act Europes Ocean Regulation
This is a historic decade for the ocean. Political support for ocean regeneration has gained momentum internationally with the ratification of the High Seas Treaty and the commitments countries made at the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice. The world’s top Courts, i.e. the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea and International Court of Justice, have furthermore highlighted the intrinsic links between healthy marine environment, climate and human rights.
A healthy ocean is not a nice-to-have: it is fundamental for all life on earth, a crucial ally in the fight against climate change, and essential to ensure public health and wellbeing for generations to come.
We have an international duty to protect and preserve the marine environment. This does not require new targets to be put in place – it is a simple question of implementing what has already been agreed by countries at the EU and international levels. The EU already has plenty of policy instruments in place to achieve this. More than a decade ago, the EU had the ambition to restore its seas to ‘good environmental status’ by 2020 and put in place various tools to achieve this. These failed to deliver because they were poorly aligned and weakly implemented.
In 2024, our Blue Manifesto – signed by 140+ organisations – set out a clear and urgent roadmap for EU action to address these systemic problems and ensure a healthy and resilient ocean by 2030. It highlighted the need for an overarching mechanism for policy coherence.
The Ocean Act has the immense potential to deliver on this and to build a unifying framework that brings much needed coherence, accountability and ambition to EU ocean governance, with ocean health at its heart. It must turn ocean policy into enforceable law, instead of voluntary planning, and ensure full alignment with the legally binding objective of Good Environmental Status and international environmental and climate commitments as a sine-qua-non baseline for all marine activities.
