Game guardian golden farm8/28/2023 Sadly, we should not hold our breath in hope.Hey everyone, lemmingllama here. In sum, before any deep sea mining is even contemplated, the ISA must be overhauled and the United Nations must revise Unclos so that the principles of “the common heritage of humanity” can be resurrected: 9 July should be about more than a moratorium, although that would be a start. And it has marginalised its second obligation, to act as the steward for the global commons by drawing up an equitable formula for sharing benefits among all countries. But the ISA does not even have an independent scientific council to advise it, just a legal and technical council. Its secretary general said: “ I don’t believe people should worry that much.” He was talking about environmental concerns. To compound the problem, the ISA has been hubristically supportive of mining. And as the ISA does not have the technical capacity or financial resources to do so, it has left corporations to do their own environmental impact assessments, which is like asking the fox to make sure the chickens are safe. Five of these are held by China.įurthermore, much mining is taking place in EEZs, where the ISA has no jurisdiction. Unsurprisingly, it has not refused any application, and currently 31 such licences have been issued for nearly 1.5m sq km of “exploration”. To supplement its budget, it charges corporations $500,000 for licences to do exploratory mining. It has a wretchedly small annual regular budget of just $10m, to regulate the world’s deep sea. The trouble is compounded by the fact that the ISA is unfit for purpose. At the moment, a few corporations seem en route to a bonanza for which they have no legitimate claim, while the rest of humanity will obtain nothing. A main preoccupation of developing countries in accepting Unclos was that benefits from mining should be shared equitably by all countries. However, while the environmental issues are rightly receiving most attention, two other aspects have been systematically neglected. And new research suggests the polymetallic nodules could contain radioactive substances, endangering human health. Mining will damage the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink, accelerating global warming. Massive machines will scour the ocean bed to pick up polymetallic nodules, destroying everything in their path and creating sediment plumes that can suffocate coral reefs and other organisms hundreds of miles from the mining site. The environmental impact of deep-sea mining could be catastrophic. Sadly, this does not include the UK, although rather belatedly the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Ocean met to consider whether it should.Īll of us should be deeply alarmed. In a state of alarm, a growing number of countries have demanded a moratorium, as have hundreds of marine scientists. Legally, applications to mine will start.Ĭommentators have noted that all the scientific evidence points to huge environmental risks. In June 2021, the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru, working with a Canadian mining company, triggered an obscure clause in Unclos that says that if a country applies to start deep-sea mining in the Area, the ISA has precisely two years to produce a code and sharing mechanism. Unsurprisingly, in the past 28 years, the ISA has failed to produce a mining code or a benefit-sharing mechanism. Today, there are 167 member countries, plus the European Union. Because rich countries did not want to give small developing countries power, they insisted that decisions had to be made by consensus. To draw up such a code, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) was set up in 1994, headquartered in the harbour of Kingston, Jamaica. Deep sea mining in the Area was to be banned until a mining code was agreed, which respected the precautionary principle in limiting ecological damage and contained a formula for an equitable sharing of the benefits among all countries of the world. But Unclos declared that the deep sea outside the EEZs, known as “the Area”, covering 54% of the world’s oceans, was “ the common heritage of mankind”.
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