James Stavridis: One of the year's most important elections just happened

Across the globe, this is the “year of elections,” with high-stakes contests in India, the European Union, Mexico, South Africa, the U.S. and many other places. But one election that will have a major effect on 70% of the world’s surface has gone almost unnoticed: the recent vote for secretary-general of International Seabed Authority, with 169 member states.

An organ of the United Nations, the ISA was created by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. Headquartered in Jamaica, it has authority over all deep seabed mining concessions worldwide, with a mandate to protect the riches of the international seabed (which accounts for more than half of the total ocean floor). Of particular note, the ISA will decide whether to permit mining in areas containing manganese, cobalt, copper and nickel.

I have on my desk a small nodule containing those elements, given to me by a colleague involved in the quest to open up this potentially important source of key materials. As a young naval officer in the early 1980s, I did my doctoral studies on the technology associated with deep seabed mining, which at the time I thought would begin very soon.

I was wrong — or, if I want to go easier on myself, just premature. Deep seabed mining has been stalled for a variety of environmental and economic reasons, as well as the requirement to share relevant technology with the global community. Now, however, the technology to surface the nodules is improving, while land-based sources are drying up and commodity prices are rising.

So the election of the new ISA secretary-general took on an outsize importance. The winner, Brazilian oceanographer Leticia Carvalho, has a strong mandate: The vote was 79 to 34. Carvalho, currently an official for the UN environmental program in Nairobi, will be the first Brazilian, the first scientist and the first woman to lead the organization.

Her predecessor, Michael Lodge, has pushed aggressively for a set of regulations for deep seabed mining, which the industry supports. Carvalho, who takes office on Jan. 1, has said that the ISA is unlikely to meet its internal deadline of July 2025 to formalize those rules.

That’s unfortunate. Particularly as electric vehicles become more popular and the need for batteries grows, the strip mining of such nodules from the deep seabed will accelerate. The ISA has issued more than 30 contracts to both private and state-run companies to look for nodules across 500,000 square miles of international seabed.

Carvalho’s election comes at a complicated moment. New and unexpected findings indicate that the nodules may produce oxygen. This means that more data collection and environmental analysis will be necessary. A minority of ISA member states (the U.S. is not one) has already called for a pause on mining, and more may join in requesting a moratorium.

The “hot zone” for mining is in the center of the Pacific, near tiny island nations of Kiribati, Naura, and Tonga. They are working with a Canadian firm, The Metals Company (TMC), to begin mining — even if regulations are not in place. This will not sit well with many of the nation-states of the ISA, some of whom see the exploitation of the seabed as 21st century colonization. A guiding principle of the Law of the Sea treaty is that the international seabed is the “common heritage of all mankind.”

But some of the delegations — including China and Japan, whose combined GDP is nearly a quarter of the global economy — are pushing forward. The U.S., while not a member of the ISA, has generally favored mining in order to support manufacturing. Several European, Australian and Canadian companies are interested in moving forward on mining for both economic and geostrategic reasons.

The rise of AI, which is used to prospect and explore the deep seabed, has allowed for more efficient mining, as have advances in robotics and nanotechnology. These technologies will only add to the pressure to mine the deep seabed.

The geopolitical implications of this are fraught. As demand for critical materials increases, the drive to create state-sponsored or state-supported entities to assure supplies will become irresistible. There will also be competition among major industrial powers to curry favor with the nations with large exclusive economic zones, constituting 200 nautical miles near large nodule fields. Already there are major state-sponsored initiatives to work with Pacific Island nations to develop their seabed.

For the U.S., the major strategic priority should be to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Ironically, it was objections over the deep seabed mining regime that caused the U.S. to oppose the treaty in the 1980s. Despite a couple of close calls over the decades, it has never been approved by the U.S. Senate. Yet it enjoys overwhelming support from U.S. naval strategists — including every admiral I know — as well as U.S. industry.

If the U.S. wants a voice in the deliberations over the deep seabed — and it should — then it needs to ratify the treaty, which will require bipartisan support, and try to influence the process from the inside. The ISA’s recent election should serve as a warning: The opportunity to make an impact on policy over the world’s oceans is drifting away (pun intended) from the U.S.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.