Ocean defense NGOs on Friday criticized the result of a board meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), as they considered that an opportunity to prevent underwater mining had been missed.
“It should be noted that the political climate has changed radically since last year,” Emma Wilson, of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, told AFP. “At that moment, there was no State that had stood up and said no to mining”.
At the end of a two-week meeting, Wilson said she remains “very concerned” that the door might be opened to deepwater mining requests this year.
Created under the UN Convention for the Rights of the Sea, the ISA has authority over the seabed located outside the Exclusive Economic Zones of its 167 Member States, which extend up to 200 nautical miles (370 km) from the coast.
For the time being, the body, based in Jamaica, has awarded exploration contracts only to research centers and companies in well-defined areas of potential mineral wealth. For this reason, it is expected that the industrial exploitation of nickel, cobalt and copper will only begin after the approval of a mining code that has been under discussion for almost ten years.
– Moratorium –
NGOs and scientists have warned for years about the damage this type of seabed mining could do to deep-sea ecosystems. More and more countries share this concern. Canada, Australia and Belgium, among others, have insisted that seabed mining cannot begin without strict regulation.
“The conditions are not present for the exploration of the seabed to begin”, insisted today the representative of Mexico, Marcelino Miranda.
“Brazil believes that the current level of knowledge and science available is insufficient to approve any seabed mining project in areas beyond national jurisdictions,” said Brazilian ambassador Elza Moreira Marcelino de Castro at the ISA meeting.
Although she has not openly asked for a moratorium on exploration, she declared that Brazil sees “significant merits” in the proposal for a “pause” in mining, defended by about 15 countries, including France, Germany, Chile and Vanuatu.
“Deepwater mining would go beyond causing damage to the seafloor and would have a broader impact on fish populations, marine mammals and the essential climate-regulating function of deepwater ecosystems,” said Vanuatu representative Sylvain Kalsakau.
He called on “Pacific countries that have expressed an interest in deep-water mining to back off,” in a message aimed at the small island nation of Nauru.
– A lot of anxiety –
But, tired of waiting, Nauru invoked, in June 2021, a clause that allows it to require the adoption of a mining code within two years. Once the deadline is met, on July 9, your government will be able to request a mining contract for NORI (Nauru Ocean Resources), a subsidiary of the Canadian company The Metals Company.
In the absence of a code, the 36-member council appears to be divided over the steps to be followed for reviewing the request for a mining contract, and tends to dissolve without reaching an agreement, according to a draft seen by AFP, which proposes the continuity of the dialogues.
The uncertainty is “generating a lot of anxiety,” said Pradeep Singh, an expert on the law of the sea and a researcher at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany.
Nauru reiterated its pledge to wait until the next ISA board meeting in July to submit a mineral exploration application, but observers told AFP they doubted the mining code would be ready for adoption at that time.
“It seems that meeting this deadline is impossible,” Singh said. “There are many points that remain controversial,” he added. Among them is the delicate issue of how the profits obtained from deep-water mining will be distributed and the measurement of its environmental impacts.
His position was shared today by the Belgian ambassador, Hugo Verbist, for whom “the two weeks of the July session will be, to a large extent, insufficient to conclude” the code.
With no clear rules on how to approve or reject a mining request, “governments recklessly leave the backdoor open for deepwater mining to jump the queue and start operating later this year,” he warned, in note, Louisa Casson of Greenpeace.
NGOs fear that if The Metals Company starts preparing to launch its production at the end of 2024, other industrial groups may ask for permissions when the two years of the clause invoked by Nauru expire.
Weeks after the historic adoption in March of the first international treaty to protect the high seas, “this profoundly irresponsible result is a missed opportunity to send a clear signal that the era of ocean destruction is over”, criticized Casson.
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