The International Seabed Authority Must Change Course Amid Series of Scandals

Confrontation with a Deep Sea Mining Ship in the at-risk Pacific Region.
 
Greenpeace International activists from around the world have paddled and protested around MV COCO, a specialized offshore drilling vessel currently collecting data for deep sea mining frontrunner, The Metals Company, on its last expedition before it files the world’s first ever application to mine the seabed in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: Martin Katz / Greenpeace

By Sebastian Losada
A CORUNA, Spain, Jul 17 2024 (IPS)

The International Seabed Authority (ISA) has enormous importance as responsible for the fate of the largest, and most untouched, biome on the Planet. Ahead of elections for its leadership, governments cannot ignore that its current Secretary-General has become the subject of both media investigations and criticism from other parts of the UN.

Michael Lodge faces numerous allegations such as a lack of impartiality, closeness to the mining industry, financial mismanagement, mistreatment of media, and attempts to silence protest. Even if some of these are generally disputed by Mr. Lodge, if he were re-elected, the credibility and independence of the ISA, an important organisation in the UN multilateral system, is seriously compromised.

The ISA, an autonomous organisation established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, is currently negotiating a set of rules that could allow large-scale extraction of mineral resources in the deep ocean. These negotiations are taking place amidst growing environmental concerns and public opposition to the harm that deep sea mining will cause to marine ecosystems we critically rely on.

A long list of media scandals

The upcoming meeting of the ISA Assembly, from 29 July to 2 August, will elect a Secretary-General. Michael Lodge, a British national who will complete his second term this year, is campaigning to be re-elected upon nomination by Kiribati. So far, the only alternative candidate is Brazilian oceanographer Laeticia Carvalho.

On 4 July, a new exposé released by The New York Times contained strong accusations of interference in the campaign process as well as of financial mismanagement. In the article, Kiribati’s Ambassador Teburoro Tito confirms that he offered Ms Carvalho a high level position at the ISA in exchange for dropping out of the race.

Carvalho denounces Lodge for using the ISA machinery for his election campaign. The article quotes allegations by former ISA employees of misuse of the organisation’s funds and plans from the German Government to scrutinise “questionable financial activities at the ISA.”

Media coverage highlighting misconduct at the ISA during the mandates of Michael Lodge includes pieces in NYT, LA Times, The Guardian and Bloomberg. Media attention perhaps reached a peak-high when American talk-show John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight dedicated a special issue to deep sea mining aired on 13 June. The video is approaching 3 million views on the show’s Youtube channel.

Lack of impartiality and closeness to the industry

Many of these media reports relate to Michael Lodge’s alleged closeness to the mining industry. As explained in March 2023 by “diplomats from Germany, Costa Rica and elsewhere” Lodge, supposed to be a neutral facilitator, “has stepped out of line by resisting efforts by some Council members that could slow approval of the first mining proposal.”

On 16 March 2023, Germany’s Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Franziska Brantner, reminded in a letter, that “it is not the task of the Secretariat to interfere in the decision-making of subsidiary organs of the ISA,” expressing disappointment that Lodge had “actively taken a stand against positions and decision making proposals from individual delegations.”

Perhaps the most serious accusation belongs to the NYT’s “Secret Data, Tiny Islands and a Quest for Treasure on the Ocean Floor” which in August 2022 exposed “interviews and hundreds of pages of emails, letters and other internal documents” showing that the ISA “provided data identifying some of the most valuable seabed tracts, and then set aside the prized sites for the [The Metals Company] company’s future use.”

Lodge’s closeness with the industry had been called out earlier. In 2018, he appeared in a promotional video of DeepGreen (now operating as The Metals Company). The video is not public anymore from its original host Vimeo, but can still be found in an LA Times article, which notes that “a big selling point at a time the company was courting investors, was the man shown walking on a massive ship and speaking of the need to mine the ocean floor: the Secretary-General of the ISA.”

According to the article, a bar tab in 2018 for a group of 15 attended by mining executives, which included $95 bottles of wine, came to $1,230, “according to a receipt and expense report filed with the secretariat.”

Sandor Mulsow, a marine geologist who served as the ISA’s head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources for more than five years, until 2019, described the work of the ISA as having “a huge bias in favour of new contractors.” “It is like to ask the wolf to take care of the sheep,” he said to LA Times.

At a hearing in the Belgian Parliament in June 2020, Lodge told parliamentarians that a moratorium, now supported by 26 ISA member States, “would be anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-development and anti-international law.” Not surprisingly, in 2020 a Radio New Zealand programme referred to Lodge as a “cheerleader” for mining interests. In response, he threatened a defamation lawsuit.

An aggressive environment for media and observers

During Lodge’s mandates, the ISA has become an increasingly difficult environment for media and civil society observers. Lodge has vocally criticised those questioning deep-sea mining, promulgated new and restrictive guidelines for observers at ISA meetings and restricted media access.

In a speech in 2018 to businesses in Hamburg, Lodge said he was disturbed by “wildly inaccurate and distorted scenarios portrayed by some sections of the media and interest groups,” saying that concerns on environmental damage resulting from deep sea mining are “grossly exaggerated and lack any basis in fact.”

In June 2021, at an International Law Conference in Singapore, Lodge talked of “a growing environmental absolutism and dogmatism bordering on fanaticism.”

Journalists who travelled all the way to Kingston to cover the ISA negotiations have expressed their dismay about how they were treated. In March 2023, Washington Post journalist Evan Halper, who had written pieces critical of the ISA, was escorted out of the negotiating chamber. Lodge has also not refrained from mocking journalists in the past, as he did in response to an article in The Guardian.

In July 2023, Greenpeace International used a spoof version of the ISA logo on billboards, calling on governments to take action to avoid being seen as the “Irresponsible Seabed Authority”. The ISA contacted the billboard agency to demand that it be withdrawn and issued new restrictive guidelines on the functioning of ISA meetings, restricting demonstrations, protests and distribution of publicity materials.

Specific measures related to the “use of the emblem of the Authority” and warned that its unauthorised use “may constitute grounds for removal of accreditation with the Authority.” The new guidelines triggered a letter signed by seven observer organisations demanding the removal of some particularly repressive provisions.

Reactions of other UN agencies and agreements

Last November 2023, Greenpeace International peacefully protested at sea against a mining company’s exploration expedition. On the high seas of the Central Pacific Ocean, activists kayaked around the vessel, and climbed its crane to demand a halt to the company’s plans to start deep sea mining in one of the world’s last untouched ecosystems.

The Secretary-General of the ISA reacted to the Greenpeace protest enacting emergency measures on the basis that the protest with inflatable kayaks was posing a “threat of serious harm to the marine environment” and ordering Greenpeace to abandon the protest, in an evident over-reach of his functions.

This caught the attention of two UN Special Rapporteurs, who had very strong words against Lodge’s attempt to undermine basic civil rights. Dr. Marcos Orellana, Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights, said he was “alarmed by the manner in which the Secretary General of the ISA has responded to a peaceful protest.” Orellana considered these actions “question the impartiality expected from the Secretary-General as much as they suggest bias towards industry interests in disregard of the Environmental Protection Mandate of the ISA.”

In a video message to the ISA membership, Michael Forst, Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention, criticised “the outrageous immediate measures issued by the ISA Secretary General seeking to prevent Greenpeace activists from protesting”, which he considered “yet again another example of the ongoing crackdown on environmental defenders and their freedoms of expression, protest, and assembly.”

As other multilateral institutions have addressed the potential impacts of deep-sea mining on their respective mandates, interventions by the ISA Secretary-General have raised concerns. In February 2024, when the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) had on its agenda a proposal for a resolution on deep sea mining, Lodge sent a letter to its Executive Secretary dismissing the work of the CMS Secretariat.

Lodge requested a review of a CMS document by “several internationally renowned experts”, which found that “the CMS document cannot be considered a credible basis for decision-making.” One of the main co-authors of such review is Samantha Smith who has worked for both The Metals Company predecessor DeepGreen and Belgium mining company, GSR. “We get letters like this all the time,” a member of the CMS Secretariat confided, “but from industrial lobbyists—not the Executive Secretary of a UN body.”

The ISA needs to change course

Under Michael Lodge’s mandate, the ISA has set a pace of negotiations of the mining code that is completely at odds with the uncertainty and lack of sufficient knowledge about the biology and ecology of deep-sea ecosystems.

While scientists are urging for more time, the ISA and a few of its member States are rushing towards commercial exploitation of deep-sea minerals. This pace is also deeply unequitable as most countries lack the financial and human resources required to prepare and contribute to three Council meetings of highly technical negotiations every year.

The ISA has had so far three Secretary-Generals. All male but from three different geographies (the Pacific, Africa and Europe). The ISA has also put a lot of emphasis on gender equality and Michael Lodge presents himself as an “International Gender Champion” at the ISA website. Re-electing Michael Lodge for a third term would not respect well established practices of geographical alternance and representation.

Further, Lodge’s mandates have been tainted with scandals and opacity. As civil society observers we demand an environment of trust, transparency and respect for the different views. This has been lacking.

It is of paramount importance that a new Secretary-General be elected that restores the credibility of the ISA and puts conservation of the deep sea at the heart of the mandate of the Authority. A re-election of the current Secretary-General would risk further eroding trust in this multilateral institution and contributing to a loss of public faith in international regulators more generally.

Sebastian Losada is Senior Oceans Policy Adviser, Greenpeace International.

IPS UN Bureau