A multitude of resources lie beneath international waters, including cobalt, copper, manganese and other minerals used to power smart phones and other technologies. Safeguarding the “common heritage of mankind,” as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea calls this vast storehouse, is a regulatory body called the International Seabed Authority, or ISA.
A quarter century after its launch, the Kingston, Jamaica-based organization is under pressure to finalize rules that will allow companies to start digging up the minerals. Scientists, lawmakers, environmentalists and other experts warn that rushing this complicated process could cause irreparable damage to some of the world’s largest ecosystems.
At the end of June, Nauru, a small island nation in the Pacific, triggered what is called the “two-year clause” – a crucial provision of the authority’s founding legislation – giving countries the power to require that treatment mining permits begins within two years.
“We are already seeing warnings from scientists that deep-sea mining risks inevitable and irreversible damage,” said Louisa Casson, senior policy strategist at GreenPeace International. “We know that our oceans are already in a state of crisis.”
At a World Conservation Congress in September hosted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a public-private organization, 81 of 127 governments and nearly 600 nonprofit groups voted in favor of the halting deep sea mining until more is known of its potential. consequences and until policies are designed to mitigate the damage. The motion also calls for reform of the ISA to “ensure transparent, accountable, inclusive, efficient and environmentally responsible decision-making and regulation.” Some big companies like Google and BMW have also signed the moratorium.
The ocean floor has never been mined and scientists fear that this new type of mining could devastate fragile and unexplored ecosystems. To collect manganese, copper, cobalt and nickel, “collectors” – large machines resembling bulldozers – would rake the top few centimeters of the ocean floor and throw the sediment about 3,000 to 4,000 meters away. on the surface, where they could be sifted. “nodules”, potato-sized rocks that contain the minerals. The remaining material, a sludge filled with heavy metals, would be returned to the ocean, where it would be released and eventually sink to the ground.
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“There is no doubt that all life on the [affected] the seabed will be destroyed,” said Duncan Currie, attorney for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an international network of more than 80 nongovernmental organizations, fishing groups and policy institutes. The sediment kicked up by the collectors would be enough on its own to choke out much life on the deep seabed, but the biggest risk, Currie said in a phone interview, would come from dumping the sludge at around 1,200 meters. below the surface, “so nowhere near the bottom of the sea,” he said, adding, “It will indeed be a toxic plume” that could travel more than 1,400 kilometers and stay in the ocean for more than year, threatening the lives of fish, squid and marine mammals.
The ISA did not respond to a request for comment or an interview on the proposed legislation or other questions about the organization and deep sea mining.
Health, wealth and redistribution: a delicate balance
Balancing the health of the world’s oceans with the potential economic benefits of mining is one of ISA’s greatest challenges. Additionally, the authority is mandated to ensure that deep sea mining contributes to reducing inequalities between developed and developing states.
“It was supposed to be an economic endeavor that was meant to lift states out of poverty,” said Kristina Gjerde, who represents the International Union for Conservation of Nature at the UN and ISA, referring to the latter. . Indeed, the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, which created the authority, stipulates that it “would take[e] with particular regard to the interests and needs of developing states and peoples who have not achieved full independence” when deciding how to mandate deep sea mining benefit sharing.
Nearly 40 years later, the logistics of this distribution remain a great unknown and a source of lingering tension among ISA members. Some 167 countries, including China and Russia, but not the United States, and the European Union have signed the law of the sea treaty. The authority is headed by Secretary-General Michael Lodge, a British lawyer who has worked as a consultant in the international fishing industry. The United States retains observer status with the authority.
What is clear is that the profits will be split between member states, sponsor states, the authority itself and the company undertaking the mining. What is unclear – a source of disagreement that will be difficult to resolve in the likely 2023 timeline triggered by Nauru – is what the split will look like and how it will be implemented.
A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describes the delicate balance the authority must strike when proposing a payment plan. If underwater mining works, it must be profitable enough for mining companies to justify the considerable costs of underwater work. At the same time, it must also pay the expenses of the authority and provide enough revenue to member states and sponsor states, like Nauru, to justify the potential damages. Finally, some stakeholders are calling for the creation of an environmental fund that would finance any necessary restoration of the ocean floor.
The ISA’s African regional group – 47 countries, comprising almost a quarter of its members – has been one of the most vocal opponents of the main financial model under consideration. A letter from an African Group representative implores the ISA to ensure that “deep sea mining only occurs if there is substantial compensation for humanity” and not to design the regime payment “as if the overriding objective . . . is to ensure that deep sea mining is not inhibited.
Calls for transparency and accountability
To ensure that deep sea mining would benefit developing states, the ISA set aside certain parts of the ocean for mining only by those countries and the companies they sponsor. But the relationship between the commercial companies that would do the mining and the countries that support their license applications raises questions about where the profits really go.
“I think the original intention was that [the companies] would actually be driven by developing states,” and that those who sponsor underwater mining companies would receive a share of the profits, Gjerde told PassBlue. In reality, “it’s really not clear who has effective control over what”.
Greenpeace’s Casson, who wrote a recent report on companies holding deep-sea exploration licenses, said: “We know there are really only a handful of governments that are really pushing exploitation. deep sea mining. There is growing evidence that these types of governments are, for the most part, working closely with private sector contractors. And when we track the ownership of the various subsidiaries or partnership agreements, it mostly comes down to these three parent companies”: the Vancouver-based Metals Company, the Belgian company DEME and the American company Lockheed Martin.
If small nations like Nauru cannot keep a strong hold on the entrepreneurs they sponsor, they run great risks: they can be held liable for the ecological damage caused by the mining enterprise and the cost of restoration.
The Metals Company issued a response to the report authored by Casson and his team, in which it argued that small island developing states like Nauru would not be able to “participate in the benefits of this new resource opportunity.”
ISA observers also ask who exactly the authority is responsible for. Its relationship with the UN is important but indirect: although it was created under the Law of the Sea Treaty, the ISA remains an autonomous body and works with UN divisions on a case-by-case basis. It is therefore unclear to whom the authority is accountable in its work.
The authority holds observer status at the UN and enjoys “great support from the Division of Maritime Affairs”, said Pradeep Arjan Singh, a researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany who specializes in the law of the sea. (The Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea is part of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs.)
“While the ISA has made efforts in some respects to align with the UN, one aspect that has been left out is accountability,” Singh wrote in an email. The ISA is not accountable to the UN but to States Parties to the Law of the Sea, which meet annually but have “no clear way to lodge complaints or grievances”.
The authority hasn’t met in person since before the pandemic hit, and it’s unclear when his next session will take place. Gerard Barron, managing director of the Metals Company, said the company aims to start “shipping products to customers in 2024”, in reference to deep sea mining. ISA’s Lodge told the BBC that he expects mining to begin in 2026.
Meanwhile, the moratorium that was voted on earlier this month at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has been backed by countries, public interest groups and big business, is a sign of the amount of work the ISA has ahead of it to achieve diplomatic consensus — and its goals for the common heritage of mankind, as stated in the Law of the Sea Convention.
This article is the first in a series from PassBlue investigating the International Seabed Authority.
Anna Bianca Roach is a Simon and June Li Center Fellow for Global Journalism and focuses on climate reporting. She has worked in Canada, Armenia and the United States and is a native English, French and Italian speaker. She holds a master’s degree in investigative reporting from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree in conflict studies from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She has written for OpenDemocracy, The Washington Post and Deutsche Welle.
