2023-07-22 20:07:53
There is definitely no consensus within the international community on the future of the deep seabed. Meeting for two weeks in Kingston, capital of Jamaica, the council of the International Seabed Authority (AIFM), which in turn brings together 36 of its 167 member states, was unable to reach, Friday, July 21, the development of a mining code intended to regulate the underwater extraction of metals. After difficult negotiations behind closed doors, the adoption of such a text, which has been in the works for ten years now, has been postponed until “the thirtieth session of the Authority”in 2025.
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Initially, the mining code should have been ready this summer, in order to finally impose legal, technical and environmental rules on companies which aim to bring to the surface of the oceans materials coveted by many industrial sectors, in particular that of batteries. Lithium, nickel, manganese, copper, lead, cobalt or mercury, these treasures lie at depths between 200 meters and 6 kilometers, in the form of nodules similar to large pétanque balls. The NGOs are all the more disappointed that the horizon of 2025 is only a “indicative target”as the Mexican Juan José González Mijares, who currently chairs the board of the AIFM, insisted.
This new report confirms the separation of the members of the organization under the supervision of the UN into two camps: on the one hand, that of the countries in favor of the exploitation of the abyss, such as China, India, Russia, Belgium and Norway, and some island micro-states such as the Republic of Nauru, in Micronesia; on the other hand, that of the countries which are firmly opposed to it, like France, or which prefer to temporize, about twenty at this stage, in the name of the precautionary principle. Among them, Chile, Panama, New Zealand, Spain, Germany and Pacific states such as Fiji, Samoa, Palau, Vanuatu, joined in recent weeks by Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and Brazil.
Legal vagueness
The question now is whether, in the absence of a mining code, a country can submit a request for deep-sea mining to the AIFM, when the latter has only issued exploration permits since its creation in 1994. The Republic of Nauru, with an estimated population of 10,000, believes so. “We are no longer in a ‘what if’ scenario, but a ‘what happens now’ scenario”Nauru Ambassador Margo Deiye said this week. She also assured that her government would seek ” Soon “ an extraction contract for the firm Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI), formed by the Canadian company The Metals Company (TMC), based in Vancouver.
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