The timetable is accelerating and relations are straining within the International Seabed Authority (AIFM). This Kingston, Jamaica-based organization wields extraordinary power over nothing less than the health of the planet. It is, in fact, empowered to act on behalf of all on the global ocean outside national waters – a gigantic space declared by the United Nations (UN) “common heritage of humanity”.
The fairly recent notoriety of the AIFM owes a lot to the warning campaigns carried out against it by environmental NGOs, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and hundreds of scientists, extremely worried about ecosystems. sailors, whom we still know very little about.
Founded in 1994, the AIFM is one of the three institutions created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, itself laboriously adopted in 1982. As such, it has 168 members, including the European Union. The mission initially assigned to it is to organize and control the exploration and exploitation of marine mineral resources. It is up to her to ensure that the developed countries are not the only ones to benefit from the “zone” (more than half of the oceans extending beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast) at the bottom of which are scattered nodules and polymetallic sulphides, cobalt-rich crusts.
Large scale testing
The environment was not the primary concern of an organization designed in the 1990s as having to finance itself in the long term with the income drawn from the exploitation of the deep seabed. The Authority is not equipped to impose sanctions or carry out checks thousands of meters below the surface on the high seas. Until now, its secretariat of around fifty people lives on contributions from member states and n It has only issued exploration permits for a renewable period of fifteen years: it has granted thirty-one to contractors, contractors and associated States. Enough to explore 1.5 million square kilometers.
But the situation changed with the campaigns carried out in the fall of 2022 by the Canadian The Metals Company, in search of nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton zone, in the Pacific. This unprecedented episode showed that the general assembly did not have to be formally consulted for this kind of large-scale testing to be authorized.
However, since 2011, the AIFM has been preparing a mining code that has given rise to many legal and diplomatic negotiations between the States, down to the comma. It must take into account technological, financial and environmental issues. In principle, as long as this settlement has not been completed, the extraction cannot begin. But some states and companies are pushing for it to be adopted as early as July 2023. A next working session is scheduled for March. For its part, The Metal Company announces its intention to apply for an operating license before the end of this year and announces that it wants to launch its activity from 2024, with or without a mining code.
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