Spain will ask to postpone ISA Board underwater mining

Already in 2023, Spain is a voting member of the Council of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which regulates underwater mining against the clock, an activity much criticized by environmentalists and which would exploit one of the few untouched areas on the planet.

According to sources from the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (Miteco), Spain will take advantage of its position on the ISA Council to defend “strict compliance” with the precautionary principle and demand a “preventive pause” in mining on the ocean floor.

Spain will try to delay the start of underwater mining until it has all the environmental guarantees

The purpose of the moratorium is to prevent all extraction “until there is sufficient scientific knowledge and effective environmental safeguards to avoid irreversible damage to marine biodiversity, ecosystems or the health of the oceans”, argue Miteco.

An “Ocean Constitution”

In 1994, the parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea introduced a provision in Chapter 11 of this kind of “Constitution of the Oceans” that allows any Member State to submit a request for the adoption of regulations for the exploitation of the seabed within two years old.

Nauru may start deep sea exploration this year

“Otherwise, the submitted project applications will be considered and provisionally approved, despite the absence of regulations”, recalls specialist Carlos Bravo, from OceanCare.

Thus, in 2021, Nauru, an island state in the Pacific, gave an ultimatum to the ISA: if within two years this body does not develop the regulation for underwater mining, the country will be able to start operations with a provisional license, despite the opposition of other members of the ISA , such as France, Spain, Chile and other Pacific islands such as Palau.

At this point, Bravo doesn’t show any hope that the ISA regulation can be ready by the end of the term – in July -, so now efforts are focused on finding “a legal way to counter or override this two-year rule”.

Macron is frontally opposed to underwater mining and calls for its ban

Some countries -including Spain- have formed coalitions to demand moratoriums on mining on the high seas, and others are even calling for its ban, as defended in Egypt by French President Emmanuel Macron, who took advantage of his speech at the climate summit last November to express his absolute rejection of the activity.

The alert is, above all, the damage that mining extraction can cause to deep sea ecosystems, about which there is almost no information but where the International Union for Conservation of Nature calculates that there is a biodiversity that can be of “vital importance” for Humanity.

Much is known about deep-sea ecosystems, but they may harbor “important” biodiversity

There is also concern that ships will dump toxic waste and sediments produced by crushing and pumping rocks at the surface into the sea, which can harm not only species that inhabit the ocean depths, but also large fish such as tuna. , and jeopardizing the health of the entire food chain.

On the other hand, some environmentalists and climate experts fear that the carbon trapped in the deep sea will be released, since the movement of the earth can re-emit CO2 and contribute to worsening the already difficult global climate situation.

Underwater mining can compromise the health of the entire food chain and trigger CO2 emissions

It is estimated that the bottom of the sea contains metals worth trillions of dollars, as large amounts of nickel, cobalt, manganese or copper can be extracted from the polymetallic nodules found in some strategic areas, critical materials whose demand in recent years has experienced a exponential growth.

Proponents of offshore mining argue that many of these materials are essential for technological development, in part necessary to electrify transport and decarbonize the economy, and highlight the socio-environmental consequences of land mining that would otherwise support the energy transition.

From Oceana, however, they point out that batteries for electric cars have already been manufactured that do not require nickel or cobalt, and maintain that at the speed with which research advances, when underwater mining becomes a reality, there will already be more efficient batteries – longer duration long- or recyclable.