US President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Thursday to boost the deep-sea mining industry and fast track permitting for the highly controversial and extractive practice in international waters, bypassing the United Nations-backed review process.

Last month, the Canadian mining business The Metals Company (TMC) announced its plans to apply to US authorities for permission to mine in international waters. This could mean bypassing a United Nations seabed regulator previously considered the only body capable of giving such an approval.

News that TMC was hatching such plans has been an understandably shocking revelation for campaigners and the number of governments who have been pushing for a mining moratorium to prevent the long-term damage the practice is thought to cause to the seabed ecosystems.

Deep-sea mining involves harvesting minerals more than 200 metres below the surface. Would-be miners are mainly targeting nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese – minerals considered essential to modern technologies like smartphones, solar panels, and electric vehicles. Well-documented and growing opposition has denounced all plans to collect them for their potential to devastate vulnerable ecosystems.

Reports indicate that the US President, Donald Trump could soon announce an executive order asserting ‘the country’s right to exploit international seabeds’ and allowing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to give interested firms permission to mine.

Dialogue Earth reports that while most attention had been turned towards negotiations across the International Seabed Authority (ISA) – a UN body that regulates seabed mining in international waters under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – TMC states that a legislation passed in 1980 gives the US authority to regulate US citizens’ commercial mining in international waters.

When asked on the legitimacy of any executive order to emerge from the White House to fast-track deep-sea mining, veteran environmental lawyer Duncan Currie, legal advisor for Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, said it was a legislation in place “only in case the US needed to invoke it as part of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) multilateral scheme.”

“It’s not there as one or the other. It was there as part of the UN scheme,” he told Dialogue Earth in an interview. 

While the US may not have ratified Unclos, it did – in 1994 – sign an agreement to amend the deep-seabed mining provisions of the convention, after it successfully negotiated all the changes it wanted. 

“That indicates that they were comfortable with it,” said Currie. “And under the Vienna Convention on the Law of the Treaties, countries that have signed a treaty have an obligation not to undermine its objective and purpose. The negotiations and subsequent signing of the 1994 agreement show the US is not in a position to oppose the provisions [of Unclos].”

What this means, according to Currie, is that the US is technically bound by customary international law to abide by Unclos and that it should not act in a way to undermine its provisions.

“The US recognises how incredibly important Unclos is to freedom of navigation, maritime boundaries, and management of resources,” added Currie. “All of those things are governed by Unclos, which is essentially the constitution for the ocean. I think those in the US government will be very reluctant to take actions that would put in danger all those things Unclos provides.”

Just this week, the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC) launched a landmark report exploring the critical opportunities available to the International Seabed Authority and the world under a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining.

The publication offers what it calls a ‘powerful alternative’ to the current rush among mining companies to exploit the deep seabed – a vision of the ISA that “prioritises deep-sea protection, science, international cooperation, and the long-term global benefit over short-term industrial exploitation.”

On hearing that the Canadian mining business, TMC was considering applying for a deep seabed mining permit through the US, Currie said: “My reaction was almost shock. Anger, Frustration. Almost every country that took the floor at the ISA meeting was deeply critical of the announcement.”

So far, the US has not acted in response to the announcement.

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