Abstract
This paper proposes institutional innovations to advance a transparent monitoring system for the environmental impacts from mineral development on the deep seabed beyond national jurisdictions managed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA). Using a literature review, ISA’s regulations, and five cases of other environmental monitoring of the deep sea, this study observes that ISA's environmental monitoring system for exploration and exploitation currently lacks critical elements to facilitate transparency. Insufficient compliance reporting and review systems, as well as limited access to information by stakeholders, lower the system's effectiveness. ISA has not developed adequate mechanisms to support effective multinational collaboration in monitoring. The ISA monitoring system without these characteristics may not be sufficiently adaptive to allow detection and management of environmental changes in the deep seabed. This study suggests 15 institutional recommendations to ISA in order to enhance transparency for monitoring nodule mining in the Central Pacific deep seabed. Principal recommendations include establishing compliance review committees independent of ISA governing bodies, implementing collective monitoring and reporting by adjacent contractors, and reconsidering the centralized decision-making authority by the Secretary-General to improve confidentiality.
Highlights
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) was established under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as the administrative and regulatory body to manage deep seabed mineral mining in “the Area”—seabed, ocean floor, and subsoil beyond the limits of national jurisdiction1
Summary The ISA exploitation monitoring comprises three systems: one is the initial application of Plans of Work and periodic review of contractors’ activities, measures and achievement based on their Plan of Work, another is the annual environmental monitoring of baseline and test mining impacts, and the other is the periodic review of Environmental Performance Assessments
The compliance review system practiced by CCAMLR based on the Secretariat’s reporting may be useful to avoid false statements but demands a specific high capacity for the Secretariat to consult the Parties
Summary
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) was established under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as the administrative and regulatory body to manage deep seabed mineral mining in “the Area”—seabed, ocean floor, and subsoil beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. As described in earlier sections, the better environmental monitoring elements should fulfill criteria (summarized in Table 1), but deep seabed mining has not yet started, and the current discussion of the regulations for environmental monitoring at ISA has many uncertainties with respect to standards, decision-making powers, the extent of data sharing, etc These uncertainties may contribute to transparency problems within the regime and downgrade future monitoring outcomes. In 2019, ISA released a brief report on the Plans of Work review for some contractors, namely, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Belgium (ISA, 2019e) Such management characteristics of LTC give the impression to the public that the system has unclear decision-making processes and lacks transparency (Wood, 1999; Jaeckel et al, 2016; Ardron et al, 2018). This fact degrades the Access of data element as the PNG regime
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