The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once a distant vision, has grown more real, raising alarms among the oceans’ most fervent defenders.
“I think this is a real and imminent risk,” Emma Wilson of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an umbrella organization of environmental groups and scientific bodies, told reporters.
“There are plenty of stakeholders that are flagging the significant environmental risks,” she said.
Photo: AFP
The long-awaited treaty to protect the high seas, even if it is adopted in negotiations resuming today, is unlikely to alleviate risks any time soon: It will not take effect immediately and will have to come to terms with the International Seabed Authority (ISA).
That agency, established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, has 167 member states.
It has authority over the ocean floors outside of member states’ exclusive economic zones, which extend up to 200 nautical miles (370.4km) from coastlines.
However, conservation groups say the ISA has two glaringly contradictory missions: protecting the sea floors under the high seas while organizing the activities of industries eager to mine untapped resources on the ocean floor.
For now, about 30 research centers and enterprises have been approved to explore — but not exploit — limited areas.
Mining activities are not supposed to begin before negotiators adopt a mining code, already under discussion for nearly a decade.
However, the small Pacific island nation of Nauru, impatient with the plodding pace of progress, made waves in June 2021 by invoking a clause allowing it to demand relevant rules be adopted within two years.
Once that deadline is reached, the government could request a mining contract for Nori (Nauru Ocean Resources), a subsidiary of Canada’s The Metals Co.
Nauru has offered what it called a “good faith” promise to hold off until after an ISA assembly in July, in hopes that it would adopt a mining code.
“The only thing we need is rules and regulations in place so that people are all responsible actors,” Nauru’s ambassador to the ISA Margo Deiye told reporters.
However, it is “very unlikely” that a code will be agreed by July, said Pradeep Singh, a sea law expert at the Research Institute for Sustainability, in Potsdam, Germany.
“There’s just too many items on the list that still need to be resolved,” he told reporters.
Those items, he said, include the highly contentious issue of how profits from undersea mining would be shared, and how environmental impacts should be measured.
Non-governmental organizations thus fear that Nori could obtain a mining contract without the protections provided by a mining code. Conservation groups complain that ISA procedures are “obscure” and its leadership is “pro-extraction.”
ISA secretary-general Michael Lodge has said that those accusations have “absolutely no substance whatsoever.”
He said that contracts are awarded by the ISA’s council, not its secretariat.
“This is the only industry ... that has been fully regulated before it starts,” he said, adding that the reason there is no undersea mining “anywhere in the world right now is because of the existence of the ISA.”
Regardless, The Metals Co is making preparations.
“We’ll be ready, and aim to be in production by the end of 2024,” chief executive Gerard Barron told reporters.
He said the company plans to collect 1.3 million tonnes of material in its first year and up to 12 million tonnes by 2028, all “with the lightest set of impacts.”
Barron said tonnes of polymetallic nodules (rich in minerals such as manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper and rare earths), which had settled on the ocean floor over the centuries, could easily be scraped up.
This would occur in the so-called Clipperton Fracture Zone, where Nori in late last year conducted “historic” tests at a depth of 4km.
However, Jessica Battle of the WWF conservation group said it is not that simple.
Companies might, for example, suck up matter several meters down, not just from the seabed surface.
“It’s a real problem to open up a new extractive frontier in a place where you know so little, with no regulations,” she said. “It will be a disaster.”
Scientists and advocacy groups say mining could destroy habitats and species, some of them still unknown, but possibly crucial to food chains; could disturb the ocean’s capacity to absorb human-emitted carbon dioxide; and could generate noises that might disrupt whales’ ability to communicate.
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