By AFP - Agence France Presse
The future of deep-sea mining is at a crucial juncture
Amélie BOTTOLLIER-DEPOIS
Divided between defenders of the world's seabed and industrialists eager to exploit the vast, untapped resources of the deep, the international community faces a crucial year that could decide the future of deep-sea mining.
“It feels like a real tipping point,” Louisa Casson of Greenpeace International told AFP.
“We're seeing a growing push for a moratorium (on deep sea mining). But at the same time, the industry is saying that 2025 is when we will start requesting mining.”
Greenpeace has been warning for years about the risks that deep sea mining poses to the unique but only partially understood ecosystems of the oceans.
Until recently, the idea of diving into the depths of the ocean's abysses to extract coveted minerals such as cobalt, nickel, and copper on a large scale seemed a distant possibility.
The world didn't pay much attention when the International Seabed Authority (ISA), created under the aegis of the UN in 1994, quietly began negotiating a “mining code” - rules for the future extraction of seabed resources in international waters.
But the timetable has gained urgency.
From July 2023, due to a legal clause invoked by the small Pacific island nation of Nauru, any country can apply for a mining contract on behalf of a company it sponsors.
(NORI), a subsidiary of Canada's The Metals Company (TMC), hopes to be the first to benefit from this, mining polymetallic nodules in the Pacific as early as 2026.
“We recognize the responsibility of submitting the first application of its kind in the world,” said TMC's chief executive, Gerard Barron.
He spoke even as the company acknowledged to shareholders that “there is no guarantee that the ISA will provisionally approve our plan (...) within one year of submission, or at all”.
The company, citing the growing need for these metals amid a global energy transition, announced that “in close consultation” with Nauru, it will submit its application on June 27.
According to TMC, this date was postponed to allow the ISA Council time to “clarify” the issue during a meeting in March.
The Council, ISA's executive body, has yet to agree on the criteria for evaluating applications due to the continued lack of an agreed “mining code.”
- Political will -
To fill this gap, the Council has established a roadmap for the adoption of a code by 2025.
But thorny issues still need to be resolved, including environmental rules and how to share the profits from seabed resources that have been dubbed the “common heritage of mankind.”
“The code is well advanced, so with political will and a lot of inter-sessional work, it is possible to finalize it by 2025,” an ISA ambassador, who requested anonymity, told AFP.
The ambassador then added: “But I don't see that political will. The countries pushing for a moratorium have no incentive to be flexible.”
Some observers also fear that the rush to finalize matters could result in some ill-conceived rules.
Clement Chazot, from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said that negotiators are still “a long way from coming up with a robust text that deals with the potential risks,” a failure that could help “buy time.”
This time could be used to strengthen the coalition of around 30 countries in favor of a moratorium on deep-sea mining.
In 2024, this group failed to persuade a majority of the ISA's 169 members to pause, but conservation NGOs hope to gain support in 2025.
For now, most member states have taken a middle ground: working to negotiate rules strong enough to allow mining while doing as much as possible to protect the environment.
Researchers and NGOs have long warned of the danger of the destruction of habitats and species that are still unknown to science but which can play crucial roles in the ecosystems of the deep ocean.
The warnings gained momentum this year with the surprising discovery that oxygen was being released at the bottom of the ocean not just by living organisms but by polymetallic nodules - a finding rejected by TMC, even though it helped fund the research.
Whatever the ISA decides, there is nothing to stop governments from doing whatever they want in their territorial waters, as Norway has done with a plan to open up some of its seabed to prospecting.
abd/bbk/st
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