Source: Mining the Bottom of the Sea | The New Yorker
It’s rare that a tiny country like Nauru gets to determine the course of world events. But, for tangled reasons, this rare event is playing out right now. If Nauru has its way, enormous bulldozers could descend on the largest, still mostly untouched ecosystem in the world—the seafloor—sometime within the next few years. Hundreds of marine scientists have signed a statement warning that this would be an ecological disaster resulting in damage “irreversible on multi-generational timescales.”
Nauru, which is home to ten thousand people and occupies an eight-square-mile island northeast of Papua New Guinea, acquired its outsized influence owing to an obscure clause of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or unclos. Under unclos, most of the seabed—an area of roughly a hundred million square miles—is considered the “common heritage of mankind.” This vast area is administered by a group called the International Seabed Authority, which is based in Kingston, Jamaica.
Large swaths of the seabed are covered with potentially mineable—and potentially extremely valuable—metals, in the form of blackened lumps called polymetallic nodules. For decades, companies have been trying to figure out how to mine these nodules; so far, though, they’ve been able to do only exploratory work. Permits for actual mining can’t be granted until the I.S.A. comes up with a set of regulations governing the process, a task it’s been working on for more than twenty years.
The complexities continue. To apply for a mining permit, companies need to team up with a country that’s party to unclos. (Most of the nations in the world are, but not, significantly, the United States.) And this is where Nauru comes in. It’s sponsoring a company called Nauru Ocean Resources, which is a subsidiary of the Metals Company, a Canadian firm. The Metals Company wants to mine a nodule-rich region of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. In June, not long before the Metals Company went public as a “special purpose acquisition company,” Nauru notified the I.S.A. that it was invoking what’s become known as the “two-year rule.” The rule—which is actually part of an annex to unclos—says that, “if a request is made by a State,” the I.S.A. “shall” finalize the regulations within two years. As it has now been six months since Nauru invoked the rule, this leaves just eighteen months for the work to be completed.
In mid-December, the I.S.A. held a meeting at its headquarters in Kingston. Because of covid, many countries didn’t send delegates, and some that did objected to the two-year timetable, on the ground that it couldn’t responsibly be met. Nevertheless, Michael Lodge, the I.S.A.’s secretary-general, said in a press release dated December 14th that the authority would forge ahead: “We have a busy schedule in the coming two years, but I am confident that our common purpose will enable us to make the expected progress.”
Both Nauru and the Metals Company have portrayed the effort to mine the seabed as essential to cutting carbon emissions. Clean-energy technologies such as electric-car batteries, at least in their current form, require metals, including cobalt, that are found in the nodules in relatively high concentrations. “Nauru is part of a pioneering venture that could soon power the world’s green economy,” a video produced by the country’s government declares. “We’re in a quest for a more sustainable future,” Gerard Barron, the C.E.O. of the Metals Company, says in the same video.
Marine scientists argue, though, that the potential costs of deep-ocean mining outweigh the benefits. They point out that the ocean floor is so difficult to access that most of its inhabitants are probably still unknown, and their significance to the functioning of the oceans is ill-understood. In the meantime, seabed mining, which would take place in complete darkness, thousands of feet under water, will, they say, be almost impossible to monitor. In September, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which compiles the “red list” of endangered species, called for a global moratorium on deep-sea mining. The group issued a statement raising concerns that “biodiversity loss will be inevitable if deep-sea mining is permitted to occur,” and “that the consequences for ocean ecosystem function are unknown.”
Critics maintain that the very structure of the I.S.A. biases it toward mining. To finance itself, the body depends on fees from companies doing exploratory work and on contributions from member states. Many member states seem to have stopped paying; a report from 2020 listed almost sixty countries that owe at least two years’ contributions. The I.S.A. is expected to receive a percentage of the profits from seabed mining if it moves forward. The potential for a conflict of interest would seem to be pretty basic. (The I.S.A. said that it could not comment at this time.)
Nauru, for its part, has a long history of disastrous business dealings. Starting in the early twentieth century, the island was stripped of most of its phosphate deposits, a process that reduced a good part of it to a wasteland. In 1968, Nauru, which had been administered by Australia, attained independence. The country used its wealth, which was still being generated by phosphate mining, to invest in a series of money-losing ventures. Now it is banking on seabed mining. Should the rest of the world allow Nauru to dictate the timetable for deciding how the seabed will be governed? The question would seem to answer itself. The noted oceanographer Sylvia Earle has called the attempt to carve up the ocean floor into mining claims the “biggest land grab in the history of humankind.” And yet, unless a lot of other nations finally decide to focus on the issue, this is what appears likely to happen.
“Countries have not really come to grips with the reality, which is that their hand is being forced by this two-year rule,” Duncan Currie, an international lawyer who advises the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, another group that has called for a moratorium on seabed mining, said in a recent interview. “And so, come July, 2023, a decision is going to have to be made as to whether to go down what is a very one-way street toward deep-sea mining at the enormous expense of the marine environment, or whether they’re going to continue to take a cautious view. And, unfortunately, it is an either-or situation.” ♦
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