Amid all the setbacks these days for environmental protection, the de facto ban on deep-sea mining feels like a small, rare victory.
The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN agency that governs mineral extraction from the ocean floor, has spent much of the past month arguing over rules that might finally allow the harvesting of metal. To those who want to prevent such exploitation, the wrangling is the point: The ongoing failure to agree on regulations, 43 years after the ISA was established, ensures that no such mining would take place.
Those celebrating should curb their enthusiasm, though. The same circumstance protecting the deep seas from exploitation — the inability to reach consensus on our common environmental heritage — is responsible for the rapid degradation of our atmosphere, landscapes and shallower waters. A world that was able to agree on responsible exploitation of the ocean’s depths would have a much better chance of addressing the damage we are doing to the rest of the planet.
Illustration: Constance Chou
The argument against deep-sea mining is that its unique biodiversity must be shielded from the rapacity of mining companies, but if you are looking for a place where digging up ore would not disturb local ecosystems, you are going to be searching in vain. Every material we use compromises the environment in some way.
Take manganese, the main element in polymetallic nodules, the potato-sized lumps of ore lying on the seabed, which are the most important target of prospective miners. At present, about three-quarters of manganese comes from just three places — a mining complex in the middle of the rainforest in Gabon; another on a biodiversity hotspot island off the northern coast of Australia; and a third on the Kalahari savannah in South Africa, a favorite shooting location for nature documentaries.
It is the same with nickel, the second-biggest ingredient in the ocean nodules. About 70 percent of supply is currently dug from parts of Indonesia, the Philippines and New Caledonia rich in threatened and endemic species. Many of the mines are already notorious for their environmental and social damage.
Mining is not the only threat to the ocean floor, either. Bottom trawlers, which drag their nets along the seabed, disturb 4.9 million square kilometers every year to collect shrimp, monkfish and the like. That is an area greater than the entire Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a huge stretch of the eastern Pacific that is the most prospective area for deep-sea mining and holds sufficient nickel for billions of electric vehicles. Voluntary codes of conduct mean that bottom trawlers are not well regulated: Only 29 percent of commercial deep-sea fish are being harvested sustainably, according to the UN’s latest assessment.
Why, then, is deep-sea mining such a cause celebre?
Probably because the intractable processes at the ISA mean it feels like a success story for environmentalists. If you can keep the mining industry out of the oceans, perhaps that could provide a model for stopping the far more harmful industries spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, mine tailings into our rivers and plastic onto every corner of the planet.
Unfortunately, it does not work that way. It has been relatively easy to ban deep-sea mining precisely because there is no very pressing interest in developing such an industry. Despite proposals from a handful of tiny companies and an ineffectual executive order from US President Donald Trump earlier this year, major miners have never shown much enthusiasm for deploying an untested technology in such remote and challenging spots of the globe, least of all if it is going to do such damage to their public images. As we have argued, the main ingredients of polymetallic nodules suffer from thin markets and volatile prices, in even the easiest regions.
On land, a mine can at least promise a stream of royalty payments and export revenues to the government granting its license, giving the regulator a vested interest in signing off on the project. The purpose of the ISA is to establish a similar global framework for the seabed and distribute its funds among the UN’s member states — but that means the benefits are so diffuse as to be almost imperceptible. As a result, nothing happens.
This is weirdly analogous to the failure of coordination that is destroying the global climate. The costs of carbon pollution are spread across the world, while the benefits are captured by individual nations and governments. Those with the power to change things have far too much to gain from the status quo. Once again, nothing happens.
Environmentalists should temper their delight about the fact that, for one more year, seabed mining has been blocked. Protected by kilometers of ocean waters, the barren landscapes of the deep seafloor are to remain relatively immune from the effects of climate change. The rest of the world will not be so lucky.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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