Te Ipukarea: Cook Islands seabed mining regulations premature

The Te Ipukareia Association has urged the Cook Islands government to delay adopting seabed mineral mining regulations due to insufficient scientific information and ongoing negotiations with the International Seabed Authority.

Last month, the Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority sought community feedback on the Draft Seabed Minerals (Mineral Extraction and Other Mining) Regulations 2024 .

This is the second draft of the regulation that we reviewed, and we provided our first comments in 2020. Despite our considerable efforts to provide comments, we never received any feedback, nor did we receive any feedback that our suggestions were incorporated into the second draft.

Despite this, Te Ipukarea Association submitted comments on the second draft of the regulations through the SBMA online submission portal.

This would require a careful reading of the 81-page document and cross-referencing other laws mentioned in the statute to understand the context. This would again require a significant investment of the Association’s time. We assume that few, if any, other comments were received from the community, although some mining companies may have submitted comments.

Te Ipukarea Association has provided a cover letter outlining our main concerns with the second draft regulations. Our main view is that these regulations are premature.

The Cook Islands government has repeatedly said it has not yet decided to proceed with mining. If that were the case, there would be no need to finalise regulations now. In fact, there are pressing reasons not to do so.

The following list provides some of them but is by no means exhaustive.

1. There is not enough scientific information to finalize commercial mining regulations.

The recent discovery of dark oxygen produced by nodules, far beyond the scope of current scientific knowledge, is a powerful example. It is too early to say what impact this will have on marine ecosystems, but it is safe to say that they are likely to be far-reaching.

The discovery that nodules (at least those from the Clarion Clipperton Zone) are radioactive and may require special care in handling is another reason for caution.

The potential impacts of mining on our migratory tuna stocks and other marine life, which are vital to our economy, livelihoods and culture, have not been studied.

• The Cook Islands should not implement a national mining code while the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is still negotiating an international mining code. Article 208 of the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention provides that laws and regulations for the prevention, reduction and control of pollution of the marine environment arising out of or connected with seabed activities within its jurisdiction shall be no less effective than international rules, standards and recommended practices and procedures. Clearly, this is a strong argument for waiting for the ISA to adopt its own mining code.
• The introduction of mining regulations will give prospecting license holders the expectation that they will be able to apply for mining licenses. Mexico has already been sued by Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc, which holds interests in two of the three Cook Islands prospecting license holders (Moana Minerals and CIC Ocean Research). The risk is that any economic benefits from mining could be lost, but worse, it could lead to significant state liability.

• The regulations need further work. The draft is seriously inadequate, particularly in terms of environmental requirements for public consultation, scientific information submission, and many other areas detailed in our online submission comments.

• Setting mining regulations now would prejudge the outcome and could have an adverse impact on the upcoming regional Talanoa Conference on deep-sea mining in the Pacific.

For these reasons, Te Ipukarea urges the Cook Islands Government not to adopt seabed mineral mining regulations at this stage unless the above issues are addressed.