How To Protect The Ocean

Holly Koehler has spent almost thirty years in rooms most people never think about: windowless UN offices in New York, the FAO in Rome, and what she calls "oftentimes very boring hotel ballrooms around the world," where countries hash out how the ocean actually gets managed. She's the Vice President of Policy and Outreach at the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and before that she spent thirteen years at the U.S. State Department's Office of Marine Conservation, chairing international fisheries negotiations. In this episode, she walks Andrew through how a grad-school internship on sea turtles turned into a career built entirely around one question: how do you manage a species that ignores every border humans have drawn?
Andrew and Holly cover what a Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) actually is and why nearly the entire ocean is already covered by one, why she says listening, not legal expertise, is the most important skill she's ever used at the negotiating table, and the story behind an all-night Thanksgiving session that produced a landmark UN resolution protecting deep-sea corals and seamounts from bottom trawling. Holly also explains why ISSF treats governance as being just as important as fishing practices, drawing a direct line from her anthropology background to her belief that governance is what civilization itself is built on, and breaks down exactly how ISSF's audits and public compliance data connect to the eco-labels shoppers see on a can of tuna.
This is the episode the whole week has been building toward. If you've been following along with Monday through Thursday's solo episodes, you've already heard the RFMO explainer, the bottom-trawling story, and the High Seas Treaty history. Here, Holly connects all of it, in her own words, including a memorable detail that resolves a question left open earlier in the week: which UN resolution she was actually in the room for.
Takeaways:
International fisheries governance runs through treaty-based RFMOs that nearly every country with a stake in a fishery has legally bound itself to join and follow.
The negotiating skill Holly says matters most isn't legal expertise, it's listening for what a country means behind what it says, since "where you stand depends on where you sit."
The all-night Thanksgiving session that produced UN Resolution 61/105, the landmark bottom-trawling and seamount protections covered in this show's Tuesday companion episode, was chaired by Holly herself.
Holly measures negotiating success by getting an agreement strong enough to matter while keeping every country that needs to ratify or implement it "inside the tent."
ISSF doesn't certify fisheries itself. It builds the audited evidence trail, through annual company audits and public vessel compliance data, that feeds into the Marine Stewardship Council certification a shopper actually sees on a label.
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Between a fishing vessel out on the water and a can of tuna in your grocery cart, there is a complex, little-understood system working to verify whether you should trust what is on the label. In this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, host Andrew Lewin breaks down how that system actually works, and why the blue check mark on your seafood means something real.
Andrew starts with the RFMO, a regional fisheries management organization: a treaty-based body where countries with a stake in a fishery legally bind themselves to cooperate on how it is managed. He walks through where these bodies actually meet, and how governance decisions travel from those negotiating rooms toward your dinner table. That includes the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), whose work spans science-based fisheries management, advancing improved fishing practices, transparency and verification tools like annual company audits and public vessel tracking, and policy engagement with RFMOs, and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), whose certification functions as an eco-label with real financial weight behind it, including why MSC pulled its certification of the Maine lobster fishery twice, in August 2020 and again in December 2022.
The throughline is that ISSF and MSC are complementary but distinct approaches to the same goal, not two steps in a single pipeline. ISSF works across science, fishing practice, transparency, and RFMO policy; independent conformity assessment bodies, not ISSF, assess fisheries against the MSC standard. This episode sets up tomorrow's interview with an ISSF representative who has spent decades inside these negotiations and will walk through what that cooperation actually looks like in the room.
Takeaways:
A regional fisheries management organization (RFMO) is a treaty-based body that turns "we should manage this fishery responsibly" into an enforceable, multi-country agreement.
Eco-labels like MSC certification carry real financial weight. Losing one can force a fishery to change its practices, even when the science on the underlying risk is still ambiguous.
ISSF's work spans science-based fisheries management, improved fishing practices, transparency and verification, and RFMO policy engagement, not just company audits and vessel tracking.
ISSF and MSC are complementary but distinct: independent conformity assessment bodies, not ISSF, assess fisheries against the MSC certification standard.
Per ISSF's 2025 audit-period report, participating companies achieved 98.8% aggregate conformance across 32 conservation measures (their tenth consecutive year above 90%), and PVR-registered vessels showed 75.6% aggregate compliance on vessel-specific conservation measures. These are two separate transparency metrics covering different populations, not a before-and-after comparison.
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There's a video online of a room full of exhausted diplomats breaking into applause after nearly 20 years of work. One woman brings down the gavel and says, "the ship has reached the shore." That moment, in March 2023, closed out a negotiation that had already failed once in public. It became binding international law this year, and the fight over what it actually protects is happening right now.
In this episode, Andrew traces the full history of the High Seas Treaty, formally the BBNJ Agreement (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction): from the idea first raised at a UN Oceans working session in 2004, through nine years of debating whether a treaty was even needed, to the failed 2022 negotiating session, to the breakthrough text agreed in March 2023. He breaks down the treaty's four pillars, benefit-sharing from marine genetic resources, marine protected areas in international waters, environmental impact assessments for new high seas activity, and capacity building for coastal nations that can't afford their own deep-sea research fleets, and explains why each one was a genuine sticking point between countries.
The treaty entered into force on January 17, 2026, making it binding law rather than a symbolic milestone. Roughly two thirds of the ocean lies beyond any single country's jurisdiction, and before this treaty, less than one percent of that area had any form of protection. Ratifications are still climbing, the first Conference of the Parties is expected in January 2027, and a long list of unresolved questions, from secretariat hosting to how marine protected areas actually get designated, will get fought out there. It's not a perfect treaty. It's a beginning.
Takeaways:
The High Seas Treaty (BBNJ) took roughly 20 years to negotiate, including a public failure at the fifth negotiating session in August 2022.
Agreement on the treaty text was reached March 4, 2023, after a marathon final session; it was formally adopted June 19, 2023.
The treaty rests on four pillars: marine genetic resource benefit-sharing, marine protected areas in international waters, environmental impact assessments, and capacity building/technology transfer.
It needed 60 ratifications to take effect. Morocco became the 60th ratifying country on September 19, 2025.
The treaty entered into force January 17, 2026, and now covers roughly two thirds of the ocean that previously had almost no protection.
The first Conference of the Parties (COP1) is expected in January 2027, where major unresolved issues get decided.
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Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, a coral colony has been growing since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished. One deep-water black coral off the coast of Hawaii has been dated at 4,270 years old, making it one of the oldest living skeleton-building organisms known to science. A single pass of a bottom trawl net can wipe out that kind of habitat in seconds, and it's a fight that's still being decided this very year at the United Nations.
In this episode, Andrew breaks down why bottom trawling is such a hard problem to regulate. It's rarely the fish stock itself that takes the worst damage. It's the seafloor habitat those fish depend on to hide, feed, and survive, and that habitat can take centuries to rebuild once it's gone. Andrew traces the policy fight behind this back to a failed 2004 push for an outright ban on high seas bottom trawling, the 2006 compromise that did pass (UN Resolution 61/105), and the recurring cycle of reviews since then that have kept tightening the rules bit by bit.
That fight isn't a closed chapter. A UN preparatory workshop on bottom fishing's impact on vulnerable marine ecosystems was held in July 2026, feeding into a full General Assembly review later this year, with advocates pushing for a firm, time-bound end to seamount trawling on the high seas by 2027. Andrew connects it to Canada's own back-and-forth over fish habitat protection in the Fisheries Act, and sets up Friday's interview with the guest who chaired the UN fisheries negotiations that started this whole process.
Takeaways:
Some deep-sea corals have been alive for thousands of years, and a single trawl pass can destroy that habitat in seconds.
Bottom trawling's real damage usually lands on the seafloor habitat fish depend on, not the fish stock itself.
The landmark 2006 UN resolution on bottom trawling (Resolution 61/105) was a hard-fought compromise reached after an outright ban failed in 2004.
International ocean policy almost never arrives finished. It gets built in stages and strengthened through repeated review cycles.
A new UN review is underway in 2026, with advocates pushing for a firm end to seamount bottom trawling by 2027.
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A grad student faces a simple choice: write another term paper, or take a summer internship. She takes the internship, gets assigned to sea turtles, and thirty years later she is in the room for some of the most consequential ocean policy agreements ever negotiated. This episode traces that career from the beginning, and it starts with a realization that shapes everything that follows: sea turtles do not read maps. They cross every border humans have drawn, which means protecting them requires countries to cooperate, not compete.
Andrew walks through the arc of this career step by step. It starts with an anthropology degree and a grad-school detour into public policy, an internship with an NGO in Washington, D.C., then called the Center for Marine Conservation, and a growing understanding that migratory ocean species force international cooperation whether countries want it or not. From there the story moves through the State Department, more than a decade on international tuna negotiations, and eventually a role at the International Sustainable Seafood Foundation (ISSF). Along the way, Andrew connects the story to his own winding path from marine biology researcher to ocean communications manager, and makes the case that careers in ocean conservation rarely move in a straight line.
This episode kicks off a five-part week on How to Protect the Ocean. Tuesday looks at corals nearly as old as the pyramids and the fight to save them. Wednesday covers the High Seas Treaty and the moment the gavel dropped. Thursday breaks down seafood policy and what retailers need to know about what shoppers actually want. Friday brings the full interview with the person at the center of this week's story.
Takeaways:
Careers in ocean conservation rarely move in a straight line. This one started with choosing an internship over a term paper and grew into three decades of international policy work.
Migratory species that ignore national borders, like sea turtles, are the practical reason international cooperation and multilateral ocean agreements exist at all.
Green sea turtle populations are showing real improvement, a genuinely hopeful data point inside an episode that's otherwise about policy and negotiation.
This is episode one of five leading into Friday's full interview with the guest whose career this episode traces.
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