In a surprise upset on the final day of the 29th Session of the International Seabed Authority, Leticia Carvalho secured the position of Secretary General over 8-year incumbent Michael Lodge. The 79 to 34 vote was a decisive rejection of Lodge’s leadership, whose tenure has been marred by criticism that he has improperly shared information with the mining companies the ISA is tasked with regulating, has abandoned neutrality in favor of mining interests, lacks transparency, as well as accusations of ethical and financial impropriety, especially in the lead up to the Secretary General election.
Read more about the run-up to the election:
- A Fraught Election Just Reshaped the Next Steps for Deep Sea Mining
- The Future of Deep Sea Mining Hinges on a Contentious Election
- Deep-sea mining’s future rests on crucial vote
- The Fraught Election to Determine Who Will Call the Shots on Deep-Sea Mining
Carvalho will be the first woman, the first person from Latin America, and the first oceanographer to lead the International Seabed Authority. As an environmental regulator in Brazil, she helped build the regulatory framework for the oil and gas industry and she currently heads the UN Environmental Program. And she is an oceanographer who worked in hydroacoustics. In the next 4 years, she will likely oversee the final negotiations for the deep-sea mining code.
Read Mongabay’s interview with Leticia Carvalho:
Carvalho has indicated that transparency and accountability are her key priorities, as well as a focus on science and a renewed commitment to neutrality. She has stated that it is not the roll of the Secretariate to take a position on a deep-sea mining moratorium.
I’m going to take a moment to wax idealistic. We have never before sat down as a planet and hammered out the actual, tangible details, for how and who profits from common heritage resources in areas beyond national jurisdiction. These negotiations are not just about the deep sea. These negotiations are wrestling with, for the first time, how humans will commercialize and exploit mineral resources that lie outside national borders.
Today it’s the deep sea, but a century from now (possibly sooner) it will be asteroids, the Moon, maybe Mars. The precedent set by the International Seabed Authority will be the framework upon which all those futures hang.
As I said in my farewell article for the Deep-sea Mining Observer:
“To talk about mining asteroids, exploiting the Moon, and staking claims on our solar neighbors may feel like science fiction amid critical, nuanced, and granular debates over the use of the terms “precautionary principle” or “precautionary approach”, but deep-sea mining has always had a special relationship with science fiction. It was science fiction when Jules Verne wrote about mines of zinc on the floor of the ocean in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was science fiction when Arthur C. Clarke wrote about dividing up the high seas into ocean pastures to be apportioned to each nation in The Deep Range. For over a century, deep-sea mining has been an integral part of an imagined future.
Almost a decade ago, I stood on the shores of Kavieng Lagoon after a long day teaching marine robotics to undergraduates from the University of Papua New Guinea, a course sponsored by Nautilus Minerals. As the sun set, I connected to a livestream of the Antares CubeSat launch, where students I had worked with that summer were sending their own satellites into orbit. On one side of the world, budding ocean scientists were building and deploying research-ready ROVs; on the other, teenagers were sending experiments into space. Ten years prior, neither program was conceivable. Ten years later, both are typical of advanced STEM education programs.
My point is this: it’s science fiction. And then, sooner than you think, it isn’t.
For good or for ill, the agreement that emerges from the International Seabed Authority on the exploitation of deep-sea minerals in the Area will set the precedent for resource exploitation beyond national borders for centuries. It will be the framework upon which future generations determine how resources we can’t even imagine will be managed for the good of humankind.
We have one opportunity to get it right.”
The ISA cannot succeed in its task if the international regulator for this new industry is viewed as compromised. A mining code developed under a cloud of scandal, earned or not, is a weak code. The election of Leticia Carvalho to Secretary-General brings renewed credibility to an organization that has been plagued by questions of ethical and financial impropriety under its previous leadership.
What happens in Kingston over these next four years very well may define mineral exploitation beyond borders for the next thousand.
Those are the stakes.
Featured image via MongaBay “In an interview with Mongabay, Carvalho says there are several reasons a change in leadership is necessary. Image courtesy of Leticia Carvalho.”
Southern Fried Science is free and ad-free. Southern Fried Science and Oceanography for Everyone are supported by funding from our Patreon Subscribers. If you value these resources, please consider contributing a few dollars to help keep the servers running and the coffee flowing. We have stickers.
