Ahead of a UN-affiliated meeting next week on deep-sea mining, an NGO-led campaign has called for a blanket moratorium on the activity and the closure of legal loopholes that permit deep-water extraction work.
The Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority will have its council meeting next week where it will look to advance negotiations around a mining code as regulations for controversial mining operations that take place deep in the ocean.
In advance of the meeting, the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC) hosted a webinar on Wednesday that called for a moratorium on the practice, claiming that the industry will cause untold damage to marine ecosystems.
“90% of the species in the Clarion Clipperton zone, the area that’s first up to be mined, are not described by science yet … but the impacts of deep-sea mining are going to be permanent,” said Sofia Tsenikli, global deep sea mining campaign lead with the DSCC, in Wednesday’s webinar.
”It will cause irreversible damage in human timeframes that would cause biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, and extinction of species before we even know them,” added Tsenikli.
Deep-sea mining raises controversy due to the noise and waste pollution that can disrupt marine wildlife and fisheries, as well as negatively affect the ocean’s carbon cycle. A peer-reviewed study released last year by an international group of academics showed that there are major scientific gaps that make evidence-based decision-making non-viable.
Beyond the environmental impact of deep-sea mining activities, the webinar’s panellists drew attention to the industry’s lack of financial and technical viability.
“Optimistic financial models underestimate technical challenges associated with seabed mining, the cost of retrieving metals from the bottom of the seafloor for the first time at industrial scale is likely to be significantly underestimated due to technological difficulty,” Bobbi-Jo Dobush, legal officer at The Ocean Foundation, told the webinar.
Canada-based The Metals Company was used as a case study during the webinar. Dobush highlighted the company’s waste spill in the Pacific Ocean and ongoing financial problems as a negative example of how intensive and non-viable the industry is.
To date, the DSCC says 23 governments have called for a ban on deep-sea mining, in addition to the European Parliament, 765 marine scientists and policy experts, and 37 financial institutions who are calling for a pause on the practice of deep-sea mining.
Currently, a legal loophole means that mining companies are able to apply for a deep-sea mining license from the ISA, regardless of the rules and regulations that are in place.
At a previous vote in July, the council failed to agree on the new mining code, and the proposed moratorium was also blocked.
Even if the rules were tightened with a new mining code, which is currently being negotiated by the ISA, the structure of the International Seabed Authority means that they are predisposed to granting seabed licences, according to Emma Wilson, policy officer at DSCC. She told the webinar that the ISA aims to be financed by royalties in mining contracts.
“We have this situation where the ISA Council — a minority group of only 36 states out of 168 — is negotiating conditions for potentially the largest extractive industry in the history of humanity, but most ISA member states and other interested parties are not even able to be in the room.”
“The council can actually only reject this application by a two-thirds majority, so that means that you have this situation where an application to exploit minerals in the deep sea can be granted by a very small minority of member states of the ISA.”
The mining code is expected to be adopted by 2025, in the meantime, mining licences for companies can still be granted by the ISA council.
By Tom Woolnough – tom@carbon-pulse.com
** Click here to sign up to our twice-weekly biodiversity newsletter **
