Many hoped the latest round of negotiations would eventually lead to a UN high seas biodiversity treaty for areas beyond national jurisdiction, also known as BBNJ. The international agreement has been in the works for more than a decade. “We are closer than ever in this process to the finish line,” said Rena Lee, president of the Intergovernmental Conference on BBNJ, during a brief address from the UN. Talks will resume at a future date, which has yet to be determined. Sea turtles are shown swimming underwater. A United Nations treaty on the high seas, more than a decade in the making, will aim to address the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in international waters. Two weeks of talks in New York are set to conclude on Friday. (Mikhail Dudarev/Shutterstock)
Only about 1% of the open sea is protected
While international waters account for two-thirds of the world’s oceans—and 95 percent of the planet’s habitable space—only about one percent is protected. “More and more studies show that marine species are disappearing fast and we need to take bold action,” said Jihyun Lee, a youth ambassador for the High Seas Alliance, which is made up of more than 40 NGOs seeking to preserve the ocean. “We have no time to waste,” he said during a news conference at the UN on Wednesday. Daniel Wagner, chief scientist of the Ocean Exploration Trust, agrees. He noted previous BBNJ negotiations and said it was critical for nations to agree on a general treaty mandating the sustainable use of international waters. “This is an area that for a long time was a bit of a Wild West,” Wagner told CBC News in an interview from Honolulu. “It’s not that there are absolutely no rules, but there’s really a piecemeal and fragmented approach right now. We need to bring all of that together and have a holistic way of managing our ocean.” WATCHES | Scientists on EV Nautilus meet sperm whale: On missions aboard the EV Nautilus, a research vessel owned by the Ocean Exploration Trust, Wagner and his fellow scientists study unexplored parts of the ocean and share their discoveries via online live streams to raise awareness. “When most people think of the open sea, the only image they would think of [about] it’s probably what you see when you look out of an airplane window — this vast expanse of nothingness and emptiness,” he said. “But when you’re lucky, like me and others … if you look in the right places, there are some really amazing things out there.” Daniel Wagner, chief scientist of the Ocean Exploration Trust, studies a deep-sea crinoid, also called a feather star, aboard the Okeanos Explorer, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship that conducts deep-sea surveys. (NOAA) From deep-sea corals to ecosystems built around hydrothermal vents, Wagner says there’s a remarkable wilderness to be discovered. “We don’t really know what’s there. We don’t really know the connections of a lot of things,” he said.
Deepwater Mining: Solution or Threat?
Without a treaty, many fear that international waters will be tapped for their resources before scientists can study life there — and understand the potential effects of human encroachment. Already, as the energy transition creates a hunger for precious metals to make batteries, companies are eyeing the ocean floor as a resource to harvest. This includes a Vancouver-based mining startup called The Metals Company, which hopes to begin mining polymetallic nodules by 2024. A screenshot from a video provided by The Metals shows the sea floor in the Clarion-Clipperton zone covered in polymetallic nodules. The Vancouver-based mining startup is one of 18 companies awarded a mining exploration contract in the CCZ. (The Metals Company) It is one of 18 companies contracted to explore for mining in what is called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), the seabed in international waters off the coast of the Pacific island nation of Nauru, northeast of Australia. Metals CEO Gerard Barron told CBC News that he believes onshore mining will not be able to meet the world’s needs and that deepwater mining is the answer. “When you start adding the metal intensity of moving away from fossil fuels, we don’t have the option of just doing one or the other. We have to make onshore mining more efficient, but we also have to explore new frontiers,” Baron said. . The idea behind seabed mining, which is in an exploratory phase of development, is to collect mineral deposits from the ocean floor using a variety of deep-sea technologies. There are three main deposits of interest: polymetallic nodules, polymetallic sulphides and cobalt crusts.
The seabed is more than a desert
Industry supporters say it’s a lower-impact alternative to onshore mining that can provide the minerals needed to make more electric vehicles. “Of course, things have an impact. The idea that we can’t have an impact is a myth,” Barron said. “The question is, what will the impacts be and how can we mitigate those impacts? And then how do those impacts compare to what’s happening today?” An underwater image taken by a remotely operated vehicle shows a nodule collection vehicle moving on the sea floor during a recent test conducted by The Metals Company in the Atlantic Ocean. (The Metals Company) When asked what his company’s study of biodiversity in the Clarion-Clipperton zone revealed, Barron said about 80 percent of the organisms in that area are bacteria, while the rest are mostly various marine worms, sea stars and some fish that “go away when we travel by them”. “I could play you videos of thousands of hours of sea floor footage that we have and you just don’t see much.” But environmentalists and scientists caution against oversimplifying the effects of mining on the seafloor by looking at just one aspect of an ocean’s interconnected web of life. “Even though our eyes don’t pick up on these tiny creatures, they’re hugely important in terms of the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycles, and how nutrients move,” Wagner said. A new order of cnidaria, a type of invertebrate, was found 4,100 meters down in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, where it lives on sponge stems attached to polymetallic nodules. (NOAA/Craig Smith and Diva Amon) Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, said the open seabed is hardly an underwater desert. “If you strip the seabed for minerals and metals and you destroy the biodiversity that’s there, that’s going to have an impact and an impact on all the biodiversity in the water column above the seabed,” she said in an interview from Ottawa. “It’s almost like having a rainforest and saying, ‘We’re just going to remove all the soil and all the microbes and microorganisms and whatever is in the soil, and somehow the rest of the forest will be fine. “” Safeguarding this ecosystem is why, Coumans said, a UN treaty on the high seas is desperately needed.
Looking at the ocean holistically
At this time it is their duty International Seabed Authority to govern activities related to minerals on the international seabed and to ensure the protection of the marine environment. However, there are concerns that big-picture impacts of deep-sea mining on the ocean will not be prioritized without a treaty on the high seas, because of the disjointed way international waters are managed. WATCHES | EV Nautilus explores biodiversity on a never-before-explored seamount: “Right now it’s kind of right hand and left hand pretending they’re two separate things — you know, ‘our jurisdiction is the water column and your jurisdiction is the bottom’ — as if those things aren’t closely related.” , Coumans said. The bottom line, Wagner said, is that scientists simply don’t know enough yet to say whether deep-sea mining can be done responsibly. “We’ve only mapped about 20 percent of the sea floor at a decent resolution. We’ve only looked at a fraction of the sea floor. So we don’t really know what’s there. I don’t really know the connections of a lot of things.” That’s why Wagner and others say investing in studying and understanding the high seas — and agreeing to a treaty that sets out mechanisms and procedures for conserving biodiversity in international waters — should be a priority.
