Deep Sea Mining Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Friday 7th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, on introducing an important and timely Bill. I was also pleased to hear her remind us that she is from Plymouth. I hope that she is able to travel home and back to us without any unwanted contact with the deep sea as she makes her progress. I also place on the record our appreciation of the steps taken to introduce the proposals in another place by the noble Baroness’s honourable friend Sheryll Murray. It is clear from debates at all stages that there is broad support for the Bill—and so it will be from these Benches in your Lordships’ House.

I personally welcome the Bill. I dealt for nearly three years with the interpretation of the international law of the sea, and also with territories, including the hyper-fragile Antarctica territories for which the United Kingdom is responsible. What we do on land has significance for the habitats in the oceans, and how we treat the oceans will have vital ramifications for life on land. The earth is, in a couple of words, wholly interdependent.

I also express appreciation for the work of the FCO officials, not least for the provision of a really helpful set of Explanatory Notes. As the notes observe, part 11 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was modified in 1994, provides for regulation of deep seabed mining. Individual states that are signatories to the convention are required to make certain that mining contractors act within domestic law in each of the assenting states so as to be sponsored by those states for the conduct of the work. Moreover, all those contractors must enter a contract with the International Seabed Authority before any activity can commence, whether exploration or mining mineral resources. Some may regard such a system of safety interlocks as being inhibiting. I do not, and it is clear in moving that the noble Baroness did not think them inhibiting either. I am sure that she is right; this is a prudent set of arrangements.

It is also true that few commercial businesses were interested initially. Companies I spoke with gave three interlinked reasons for that. First, it was technically difficult and expensive to undertake such work, as the commercial risks were high. Secondly, there was little clarity about what might be found, and in what quantities. Again, that compounded the commercial risk. Thirdly, even if there were significant polymetallic nodules or resources lying in the sediment at slightly deeper levels, it was not clear that there was a significant enough market, given that there are known polymetallic resources on dry land and that the size of existing markets for mined products might not at one stage have been sufficiently large. That gave little reassurance to businesses assessing commercial risk. The consequence, at least in my view, was that it was close to impossible to price the risk. Companies could not price it in allocating their own working capital, and neither could they or market analysts price it for either quoted markets or for private equity or debt. It was pretty much beyond reasonable computation. No wonder that things moved at the pace of a deep-ocean snail.

What changed all that—and I was very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, for touching on these facts—is that there has been a considerable move in a positive commercial direction. There has been progress in the development of technologies capable of operating in deep water, both submarines and robotics, and the rapid growth in demand for polymetallic nodules and polymetallic sulphides, as well as cobalt and rare earths—which are of some significance in this—created by the huge economic surges in China, India, Russia and Brazil, and now in Turkey, Mexico, Indonesia and Nigeria, has all but overwhelmed the supplies that might be available on land. The same has happened with other commodities as varied as oil, concrete, iron, wheat and beef, which are all part of the same economic trajectory. Finally, the science has become clearer about what could be found at different depths, making the targeting of specific minerals a practical task. In short, it became easier to price risk, raise and deploy capital with a degree of certainty about the returns, and then commence the work.

Two problems immediately surface. The original convention and consequential legislation did not cover all the new circumstances that we have seen and which have been among the areas of change described by the noble Baroness and by me today. The updating this new Bill aims to achieve would be welcome enough on those grounds alone. However, it helps us add the second missing ingredient: the environmental issues and our responsibility to protect the environment. We cannot regard this obligation as merely helpful. It is obligatory and summed up in the initial iteration of Clause 5 of our own 1981 Act. I will quote it briefly because the groundwork was set at that time. It states:

“In determining whether to grant an exploration or exploitation licence the Secretary of State shall have regard to the need to protect (so far as reasonably practicable) marine creatures, plants and other organisms and their habitat from any harmful effects which might result from any activities to be authorised by the licence; and the Secretary of State shall consider any representations made to him concerning such effects”.

That is not a bad start. However, more than 30 years on, and guided by the Rio Declaration, particularly at principle 15, we know more but still not enough about the environment. A precautionary approach seems very sensible. That precautionary approach, urged on us by the World Wide Fund for Nature and many others, should be part of our focus today. We have urged the same approach on other nations in fragile environments, for example in our legislation on the Antarctic and in our criticisms of some of the mining proposals others have had in respect of the Arctic as well.

I hope that the House will not misunderstand the argument I am trying to put. I do not say for a moment, “Do nothing until we know every possible consequence”. That is not what I mean by “precautionary”, and would be a legal and practical veto on doing anything. I accept that it is impossible to say that nothing is permitted until we know everything; there would be no progress at all if such an overwhelming test of efficacy was to be imposed. I argue, rather, that we should proceed in a circumspect and incremental manner, using what science can tell us wherever possible.

The first-order question is easy: should we protect the environment and husband its living resources? The answer is obviously yes, but what follows? Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and others involved in advancing the Bill may take a view, even if not in the course of today’s debate. I just wish to record some things which we need to resolve, but I do it in a wholly friendly spirit, because these issues concern us all.

Will the entire procedure for granting exploitation contracts be sufficiently robust and well integrated, given the multiple issues—authority at the mining location, knowledge of the ecosystem at the location, and control over mining practices? Not all the information or decisions will lie in the hands of any one party. They will need to be integrated to get a holistic picture and avoid the scope for real error.

Is the ISA able to monitor and police at scale? I have no doubt that it can do it in a limited way, but I am not as convinced that it can do it at scale; that is something that we should explore. Do we have evidence of risk of extinction for affected species? For example, do we know if sedimentary plumes below known densities of specific depths are dangerous or benign? Can scientists advise us on risk mitigation capable of being written into any set of regulations? What density of mining activity in any one location will be allowed on environmental grounds? Indeed, what will be the criteria for awarding permissions?

There is an opportunity to mine between 1,400 metres and 5,000 metres below the surface. I think that I am right in saying that it is usually near active or extinct hydrothermal vents in the earth’s crust—and I am grateful to the noble Baroness for identifying these parts of the globe. But we know that those are precisely the locations of a vast array of aquatic life; they happen to be particularly dense in species of animal life. Preferred methods will spread the sedimentary plumes far more widely than the water column where the mining is actually undertaken. Will the Government perhaps be able to commit themselves to funding longitudinal research to ensure that we know as much as possible about each incremental step so that we can make the best informed decisions without preventing the development of this commercial and necessary opportunity?

I hope that no one will say, in answering, that we should rely on the United Nations agencies for the research, as they take too long—and much of the research, to be candid, is not that great. We, along with the United States and some our European partners, have universities capable of really credible research in these areas, and I would wish to see that done because I am much more confident of the quality of the research that could be done that way.

Important as these questions are, progress today on the Bill is important, as it will be in later stages. For those reasons, I finish by saying that we support the Bill and wish it rapid progress, and I thank the noble Baroness for introducing it.