Impressions of a scientist at the ISA: March 30th 2024

I had managed Europe’s Academies of Science review of the science relating to deep-sea mining last year, so it was an opportunity to see the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in action when I was invited by the Blue Climate Initiative to a side event during the former’s 29th session in Kingston, Jamaica, on March 25th. We examined the claims and counterclaims that policymakers are faced with and concluded that the science supported those countries that had called for a precautionary pause or moratorium. The bottom line was that deep-sea mining was not possible without significant environmental damage and biodiversity loss, so the key was to find a way of assessing this inevitable trade-off and reaching a consensus on the balance between risks and benefits. Yet what I found during my visit to Kingston was a line-by-line review of the mining code to allow the industry to proceed as soon as possible, before data were available and structures to properly evaluate risks in place, with considerable disagreement between members of the ISA Council on most of the current drafting. This process is being pushed through by one or two member-states supported by the secretariat by means of a punishing schedule of three meetings a year. This is in stark contrast with the Convention on Biological Diversity, which meets every five years, and the Climate Change Convention, ‘whose meetings were only recently increased to once a year. Speaking to some country delegates, it was apparent that this placed a huge burden on smaller countries' human resources and budgets. 

One of the various claims about deep-sea mining is that the critical materials needed for the green transition need to come from a new source—the deep sea. We pointed out the falseness of this narrative in last year’s study: of the 34 critical materials currently on the EU's list, only four can be sourced from deep-sea nodules, and three of these (manganese, copper and nickel) were of “very low” supply risk, with that of cobalt assessed as “moderate”. We pointed out that the industry is continually developing solutions that can use cheaper and more abundant resources to avoid costly metals, and that great potential remains for setting up reverse supply chains for the effective recycling of batteries and solar panels, etc. Indeed, my co-panellist Dan Kammen (renewable-energy professor at University of California Berkeley) pointed to the trends in car batteries, with rapid growth in lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, or LFPs (currently accounting for 36% of today’s fully electric vehicle production and 52% of global battery production, all applications combined), and the potential of many others like solid-state batteries—all designs that avoid the use of cobalt and nickel, as well as being safer and having greater durability and longevity. Such trends may have contributed to the 50-70% collapse in both nickel and cobalt prices over the last two years. 

Another claim we had examined was that deep-sea mining would be the lesser of two evils compared with terrestrial mining. How you can make such a judgment is unclear, but one relevant factor is that the area you have to dredge at the seabed is many hundred times larger than on land, because the minerals at the seabed are at the surface rather than in deep deposits. Terrestrial mining also has a four-stage biodiversity strategy (loss avoidance, mitigate, remediate/restoration and offset) that is capable of being applied and monitored. This is not the case for the deep sea, where the attraction may be “out of sight out of mind”. Finally, it is clear that deep-sea mining is not possible without destruction of the habitat and replacement by sediments inhospitable to recovery, so likely to persist for very long periods of time. That is why it is difficult or even impossible to say objectively whether Article 145 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on Protection of the Marine Environment can be satisfied.

Listening to the council debate about the text of the mining code, I recalled the words of Kenneth Boulding in 1966 when he characterised the economy as the “cowboy” economy, because as soon as we started to run out of resources we always looked for the next frontier to explore and exploit. He said that sooner or later we would need to move to the “spaceman” economy where we recognised the inherent limits in our planet and managed our economy accordingly. I could not help thinking that deepsea mining is a relic of the cowboy economy almost 60 years on—and that the ISA secretariat is engaged in unjustifiably heroic efforts to force this through, under pressure from just one or, at most, a handful of member-states. This is going in the opposite direction to other major international policies, where the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Agreement on the Protection and Sustainable Use of Marine Biodiversity in Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) are seeking to expand the protection of biodiversity in the seas, and the need to reduce our consumption of resources to sustainable levels (see the Global Resource Outlook 2024) is increasingly recognised. 

Views or opinions expressed are those of the author and any individuals cited, and do not necessarily reflect those of Economist Impact or any other member of The Economist Group.