Editorial | Don’t go rogue on deep seabed

The timing of The Metals Company’s (TMC’s) disclosure would have precluded the matter making it to the agenda of last week’s talks between Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Nonetheless, Mr Holness, and indeed the other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders who met Mr Rubio during his swing through the region last week, must ask him to place the prohibition of deep seabed mining without authorisation from the International Seabed Authority (ISA) on the list of issues the Caribbean wishes the Trump administration to commit to. That would be in keeping with Jamaica’s policy, clearly enunciated in 2022 by the island’s foreign minister, Kamina Johnson Smith.

The Metals Company is a Vancouver, Canada-based seabed mining firm with a US subsidiary. Last Thursday, a day after Mr Holness and Mr Rubio met in Jamaica, and as the ISA’s council was winding down a two-week session at its headquarters in Kingston, TMC disclosed that it was asking the United States to sanction its mining of critical metals in the deep seabed in the Pacific Ocean.

Claiming that the ISA was moving too slowly on establishing rules for that process, TMC said that “officially requested a pre-application consultation” on a licence from the US administration. The ISA warned that unilateral action by the United States outside the framework of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) would “violate international law and undermine multilateral governance”.

COMMON HERITAGE

The United States signed, but hasn’t ratified (169 countries have) the law of the sea convention, which declares the resources of the deep seabed, in international waters, “the common heritage of mankind”.

Those resources include polymetallic nodules and sulphides, as well as a range of metals used in modern technology.

The ISA has earmarked a 1.7-million square mile area, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, between Mexico and Hawaii, for eventual deep seabed mining. It has awarded licences to several state, or state-sponsored companies to conduct exploration in the zone, but has issued no mining permits while it continues its decades-long process of drafting a mining code.

TMC has an exploration licence, under the sponsorship of the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru. However, the company is facing financial pressures, having posted a US$81 million in net loss last year and is running low on cash.

Although the United States is not a member of UNCLOS, it established its own legislative regime for deep seabed mining. But no US-approved firm has actually extracted metals from the oceans floors, although licences were awarded in the 1980s to a consortium of major companies. In those early years, the technological challenge of mining the deep seabed proved an economic hindrance.

While much of the technological problems have been overcome, especially with the advance of autonomous underwater vehicles, there has been a growing movement against deep seabed mining. Nearly three dozen signatories to the law of the sea convention have promoted the idea of permanent moratorium of mining the deep ocean beds. Environmentalists are concerned that irreparable damage could be done to a part of Earth about which too little is known or understood.

NOT PUBLICLY DECLARED

While Jamaica, which has sponsored one company for an exploration licence, has not publicly declared a position on a mining ban, it previously made clear that would be against what TMC wants the Trump administration to do.

“While Jamaica continues to attach significant importance to the full and effective implementation of [the] United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, I wish to state unequivocally, that the Government of Jamaica is not prepared to support deep-seabed mining before an appropriate, robust regulatory framework is put in place, in keeping with the guiding thrust of our deliberations,” Foreign Minister Johnson Smith said at that 2022 ISA session marking the 40th anniversary of UNCLOS.

With the Trump administration rolling back a raft of environmental regulations, TMC believes that it cashes in on what the company’s chief financial officer characterised to investors and analysts as America’s increasing readiness “to retake its role as a leader in this industry, and to provide explicit support for the collection of polymetallic nodules”.

However, should the US pursue an independent agenda on deep seabed mining, it would have scorned ISA’s exclusive jurisdiction in the international seabed mining area. And as the authority’s secretary general, Leticia Carvalho, pointed out, America would have violated international law and “undermine(d) multilateral governance”.

This kind of subversion of global arrangements isn’t in the interests of small countries like those of the Caribbean, which, in this case, is exacerbated by their special vulnerabilities to rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change.

Especially after Mr Rubio’s seeming openness to Caribbean concerns, the region must tell America about its fears of Washington operating outside the global regime on deep seabed mining.

If there are concerns about the pace of ISA’s rule-making, there are more appropriate ways for those to be addressed.