Mining in the deep sea, industrial fishing, maritime transport… For thirty years, human activities have been developing massively in our oceans, where regulations are almost non-existent. It is urgent to regulate the blue gold rush, warns the “New Scientist”.
In the 1970s, the small island state of Nauru was briefly one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Its per capita income was equivalent to that of Saudi Arabia, except that its wealth was not derived from oil but from excrement. For millennia, seabirds have dropped their droppings on the island when passing through, creating a thick layer of guano rich in phosphate, an essential ingredient in the manufacture of fertilizer.
But the splendor does not last forever: in the early 2000s, there was nothing left of all this guano. Today, Nauru is no longer wealthy, but it is at the forefront of the exploitation of another resource, not without controversy. Since 2021, the country has been seeking to launch mining in the deep seabed as soon as possible, perhaps as early as 2023.
The microcosmic example of Nauru is a very good illustration of the world situation. As competition for land increases and the earth’s resources are depleted, governments and businesses are looking to the high seas and the ocean floor, which they believe holds the next windfall. Whether mining exploration, maritime transport, energy, tourism, desalination, cable laying, bioprospecting – the list is long – the sectors of activity that rely on the marine environment are in full swing. boom.
This “blue acceleration” worries more than one. On land, we cannot say that we have achieved sustainable development. To the extent that it is increasingly easy to profitably exploit maritime resources that are difficult to access and that the law in this area remains unclear, we risk a rat race at the bottom of the oceans. “Our society is based on the degradation of nature, the destruction of nature, says Enric Sala, a marine ecologist who holds the title of National Geographic Explorer. It is vital to understand that we cannot repeat in the oceans the mistakes made on land.” There remains a multi-billion dollar question: how to do it?
new frontier
Exploitation – or rather overexploitation – of the oceans is nothing new. Let us quote the collapse of the populations of whales because of the hunting of the XIXe and 20e centuries, the depletion of once abundant fish stocks and the degradation caused by bottom trawling. But since the 2010s, our interest in the oceans has taken on a whole new dimension. In 2016, the OECD – a club of wealthy countries – predicted that the marine economy would become the main driver of global economic growth, growing from $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion between 2010 and 2030.
“We are in a new phase of humanity’s relationship with the ocean, summarizes Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, who works at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University. The ocean concentrates a lot of hopes and expectations, as a new economic frontier and as a driver of future human development.” Jean-Baptiste Jouffray and his colleagues proposed the term “blue acceleration” in an article published in 2020, a variation of the “great acceleration”, which designates the sharp increase, from 1950, of all measures of human impact on land – population growth such as resource extraction.
This recent plunge into the ocean is particularly linked to the technological advances that have made it possible, whether it be offshore drilling, offshore wind turbines, desalination plants or factory trawlers. Jean-Baptiste Jouffray explains:
“Many offshore activities were unthinkable just a few decades ago.”
The word “sustainable” can hardly be used to describe most maritime industries. The economy of the sea is currently worth 1,700 billion dollars, almost half of which is drawn from the offshore production of oil and polluting gases (830 billion dollars [790 milliards d’euros] per year), followed by construction of marine equipment, fisheries and container shipping – the latter being a major polluter that escapes almost all regulations. In this list, the sustainable sectors of tomorrow are almost invisible. Offshore wind lags behind in eighth place with revenues of just $37 billion [environ 35 milliards d’euros].
This state of affairs is not without consequences. “The ocean is already experiencing a very serious crisis”, notes Sebastian Unger of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany. More than 50% of the oceans are already feeling the effects of the loss of their biodiversity, noise pollution linked to human activities, chemical and plastic pollution, says the scientist, and few are the places that are intact. And during this time, we have missed the objective of protecting 10% of coastal and marine areas by 2020, in particular the areas most essential to biodiversity: 7.7% of them are partially protected and 2 .4% only are fully protected. Only 1% of the high seas are protected.
“Blue economy”, an overused term
The visions