#seabed mining

After a decade of debate, by year’s end the world should finally have a rulebook for mining the deep sea, Leticia Carvalho, the head of the International Seabed Authority, said in an interview.

It’s her job to help make it happen. And in the past year, the Trump administration has made the task far more urgent. She called it “absolutely existential” that the 170 nations in the authority now reach an agreement.

That’s because the Trump administration has said it will start unilaterally issuing permits for seabed mining in international waters, the vast stretches of the ocean that are not the domain of any one country. Regulators in the United States are now considering applications from companies that want to mine in these areas for valuable minerals, a practice that is environmentally controversial and has never been done on a commercial scale.

“The world agreed 30 years ago that this is an area that belongs to all of us, and we should go there collectively,” Ms. Carvalho said. In a world without international rules, she said, the oceans could turn into a kind of “Wild West” where each nation makes up its own.

This week, the seabed authority that she leads began its annual meetings in Kingston, Jamaica, to try to end the impasse. The authority was created in 1994 under a global treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, as an independent body to regulate use of the seafloor in international waters, which cover nearly half the planet.

The United States has not ratified the U.N. convention, but has observer status at the authority’s deliberations and, until recently, followed its standards.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The long-running battle over whether to allow Pacific Ocean seabed mining took an unexpected turn Thursday when a company disclosed it had been confidentially negotiating a plan with the Trump administration to circumvent a United Nations treaty and obtain authorization from the United States to start mining in international waters.

The proposal, which drew immediate protests from environmental groups and diplomats from some countries, represents a radical shift in the contentious debate over accessing deposits on the sea floor that contain copper, cobalt, manganese and other metals that are needed for electric-car batteries.

The International Seabed Authority, established 30 years ago by an agreement now ratified by more than 160 nations, has jurisdiction over seabed mining in international waters, outside the coastal areas of each nation.

The Seabed Authority has been slowly crafting regulations governing mining, which remains highly contentious because the potential effects of industrial activity on marine life are unknown.

Now the Trump administration, which has already expressed its desire to retake the Panama Canal and assume control of Greenland, is being nudged by the Vancouver-based Metals Company to disregard the Seabed Authority and grant it a license to start mining as soon as 2027.

Gerard Barron, the chief executive at the Metals Company, announced the maneuver Thursday after it became clear that it could still be years before the Seabed Authority finalizes mining regulations.

Contractors from nations including China, India, South Korea, Japan and Poland are also doing exploratory work in international waters under permits from the Seabed Authority, but none of them have been given permission to start large scale mining.

The Metals Company’s application would come in the next several months from a United States-based subsidiary of the company, and it would use a ship registered in the United States. The company would send a giant vacuum-cleaner-like machine 2.5 miles underwater to the ocean floor to suck up potato-size rocks that are loaded with metals.

Excerpt from this story from Hakai Magazine:

When Arvid Pardo, a Maltese diplomat, took the floor at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1967 and began speaking at length on international law, the room was sparsely populated. Pardo was undeterred.

The deep, dark ocean, he said, is the womb of life. “We still bear in our bodies—in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears—the marks of this remote past.” With technology fast progressing, “man, the present dominator of the emerged earth, is now returning to the ocean depths. His penetration of the deep could mark the beginning of the end for man, and indeed for life as we know it on this Earth; it could also be a unique opportunity to lay solid foundations for a peaceful and increasingly prosperous future for all peoples.”

Pardo argued that the deep seafloor falls outside the territory of any state. As humanity raced to exploit the “immeasurable wealth” already known to be hiding there, Pardo said that wealth should be viewed as the common heritage of humankind.

At a time when countries around the world were grappling with the Cold War along with the lingering consequences of colonization and exploitative resource extraction, Pardo’s treatise struck a nerve. After all, who should have access to the deep? Who should benefit from its wealth?

His speech—later characterized by historians as a “you should have been there” moment—set the stage for nearly a decade of negotiations. Eventually, those discussions resulted in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) containing this language: that any industrial activity on the international seafloor must “be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole.”

Excerpt from this story from Hakai Magazine:

Earlier this year, Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer and environmental policy expert, took the helm of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) as secretary general. The ISA, an intergovernmental body that governs what happens on the seafloor in international waters, is responsible for an area that spans more than half the planet.

One of the agency’s key roles is in deciding the future of deep-sea mining, a nascent industry targeting tennis ball–sized rocks called polymetallic nodules. Rich in cobalt, nickel, and other valuable metals, polymetallic nodules can be found in some areas of the seafloor, most notably in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast tract between Hawai‘i and Mexico.

In a landslide victory, Carvalho unseated Michael Lodge, an English lawyer who had served as the ISA’s secretary general since 2016. Lodge’s tenure at the international body—which is tasked with the contradictory goals of both helping deep-sea mining get off the ground and keeping it in check—was marred by allegations of bribery, corruption, and of Lodge having an undue bias toward the mining companies the ISA oversees, all of which Lodge has vehemently denied. Many environmentalists and scientists welcomed the news of Lodge’s displacement.

In the wake of her win, Carvalho told Mongabay that she aims to rebuild trust in the ISA, and in Politico she said she planned to investigate the corruption and mismanagement allegations. But Carvalho’s term does not seem set to bring about the kinds of sweeping changes that would satisfy the 32 countries that have called for a pause on the development of deep-sea mining—including Canada, New Zealand, and Costa Rica—or those, like France, pushing for an outright ban.

For years after the ISA’s inception in 1996, environmentalists, mining industry representatives, and government delegates gathered at the agency’s seaside headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, to develop the Mining Code—the set of rules and regulations that will govern everything about deep-sea mining from who is allowed to mine to how they will mine, and even the way the industry’s proceeds will be disbursed to, somehow, benefit all of humanity. For 25 years, deep-sea mining was a distant reality. Negotiations were easygoing, and those gathered in Jamaica would mingle at weekend retreats and dance parties.

All that changed in 2021 when representatives from Nauru, a Pacific Island nation, triggered a clause in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) known as the “two-year rule.” The move meant that, suddenly, the ISA had only two years to either finish the Mining Code or consider a company’s application to exploit the seafloor with whatever unfinished rules it happened to have in place.

Norway has declared its full support for a UN treaty to protect marine biodiversity in the high seas, despite drawing fire over plans to open up swathes of its own territorial waters to exploration for critical raw materials, potentially a step towards granting seabed mining concessions. Norway will not go ahead with plans to permit seabed mining of critical raw materials on its continental shelf if initial exploration suggests it cannot be done sustainably, a foreign ministry official told Euronews, as the European Commission prepares to sign a bilateral agreement with the Scandinavian state on the sought-after materials. State secretary Maria Varteressian affirmed Oslo’s support and intention to quickly ratify the United Nations Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Treaty, also known as the High Seas Treaty, at an event in Brussels on Thursday (7 March). Norway attracted sharp criticism earlier this year over its decision to open up swathes of its extensive territorial waters to exploration for critical raw materials, a potential step towards mining the seabed for what EU markets commissioner Thierry Breton is not alone in characterising as the “new oil”.

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Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Major seafood industry and marine conservancy groups are calling for a “precautionary pause” in the global race to mine deep-sea minerals, pointing to new research that suggests excavating the ocean seabed could cause tuna populations to plummet.

The groups said Tuesday that they will send an appeal to the United Nations-backed International Seabed Authority (ISA), asking it to proceed with extra caution in developing regulations and complete them before granting any licenses to mine seabeds thousands of feet under the ocean’s surface. 

Most of the waters proposed for such development lie beyond national jurisdictions and have become the latest frontiers and flashpoints in the global rush to source rare metals for electric batteries and other technologies that are important for the climate-critical transition away from fossil fuels.

The appeal coincides with research, published Tuesday in the journal Nature npj Ocean Sustainability, finding that tuna—one of the world’s most valuable fisheries, worth $40 billion a year—will migrate away from increasingly acidic and oxygen-starved waters into an area of the Pacific called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. 

This region, between Hawaii and Mexico, is rich with polymetallic nodules that are embedded with minerals, including nickel, cobalt and copper, and has been targeted by deep-sea mining companies seeking licenses to exploit the resource. 

“This is the first time there’s ever been climate modeling of tuna stocks in relation to deep-sea mining,” said Diva Amon, the lead author of the study and a marine biologist with the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “And it’s also the first time, more importantly, that seafood industry players, including some pretty major ones, have come out with a statement about needing a moratorium.”