There is definitely no consensus within the international community on the future of the deep sea floor. The Council of the International Seabed Authority (AIFM), which in turn comprises 36 of its 167 member states, met for two weeks in Kingston, capital of Jamaica, and on Friday July 21 failed to agree on the development of a mining law designed to regulate underwater extraction of metals. After painful negotiations behind closed doors, the adoption of such a text, which has been in the works for ten years, has been postponed to the “thirtieth session of the agency” in 2025.
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Originally, the Mining Law should have been ready this summer to finally impose legal, technical and environmental rules on companies aiming to bring materials coveted in many industries, particularly batteries, to the sea’s surface. 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 in size to pétanque balls. The NGOs are all the more disappointed that the 2025 horizon is only an “indicative goal”, as emphasized by the Mexican Juan José González Mijares, who is currently the CEO of the AIFM.
This new report confirms the division of the members of the organization under the supervision of the United Nations into two camps: on the one hand, that of the countries that favor 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, those of the countries that are resolutely opposed, like France, or that prefer to set a time limit of around twenty at the moment, in the name of the precautionary principle. These include Chile, Panama, New Zealand, Spain, Germany and Pacific countries such as Fiji, Samoa, Palau, Vanuatu, with Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and Brazil joining in recent weeks.
legal ambiguity
The question now is whether a country without a mining law can apply to the AIFM for deep-sea mining if the AIFM has only issued exploration permits since its inception in 1994. The Republic of Nauru, with an estimated population of 10,000, believes in it. “We are no longer in a ‘what if’ scenario but in a ‘what now, what happens’ scenario,” Nauru Ambassador Margo Deiye said this week. The latter also pledged that her government would “soon” seek a mining deal for Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI), which was set up by Vancouver-based Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC).
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