Curbing illegal and high-seas fishing will also reduce human suffering. Working and living conditions are often appalling on vessels that stay out at sea for months, even years, at a time. Investigations of industrial fisheries have found cases of human trafficking, debt bondage, forced confinement, physical abuse, and even murder. Out in distant waters, atrocities of modern slavery go unseen and unpunished. Removing subsidies will force more of these unethical operations out of business.
In March 2023, another milestone for the ocean was reached, which likewise took decades to negotiate. Member states of the United Nations gathered in New York and agreed to a new treaty to protect the high seas. At the heart of this is a legal framework that will help to bring the rampant exploitation of the high seas under control, to conserve wildlife and establish vast new marine reserves. There will be a new conference of parties, like those overseeing the global climate, in which UN member states can be held to account for how they operate in the high seas. It means the distant parts of the ocean will no longer be overlooked and ignored.
The industrial fishing trade urgently needs to change the deals rich fishing nations strike with poorer countries in order to gain access to their waters. Broadly speaking, the history of global fishing has seen highly industrialised nations overexploiting their nearby seas, then moving into more distant regions so they can keep catching more fish. Governments, many of them in Africa, sell access agreements to foreign industrial fishing fleets, including those from China, Russia, and the European Union, in particular Spain. The prices for these licences are a paltry sum compared to the amount of money the catches sell for. European countries pay on average 8 per cent of the value of the fish they catch off West Africa; China pays on average 4 per cent. These foreign fisheries are paying very little to snatch away fish from nations that rely most on healthy seas for jobs and food.
Progress is desperately needed to halt the damage foreign vessels are inflicting on habitats and species, and to protect people’s lives. In recent years, surging numbers of people from Senegal have braved the ocean in tiny canoes to try to reach Europe. Many are former fishers who have watched as foreign fleets have wrecked their way of life, ransacked local fish and habitats, and made the seas treacherous for them to work in. They see no other option. A popular gateway to Europe is the Spanish-owned Canary Islands, nine hundred miles north of Senegal. Thus, the country that sends huge industrial ships to West Africa is seeing ever more small, precarious boats filled with desperate people heading back in its direction. Every year, hundreds of migrants starve and drown en route.
Governments that sell licences to foreign fleets need instead to phase them out and put their citizens first, prioritising their health and livelihoods. And governments in richer nations, especially those in the European Union that profess to be environmental and human rights leaders, should be disgraced for aggressively negotiating and buying licences that effectively steal fish from hungry mouths and stoke the migrant crisis. Some headway was made when China cancelled foreign permits with three of its national companies for breaking fishing regulations and operating illegally off West Africa. Much more needs to be done to end these unethical and ecologically ruinous agreements.
In a future ocean that’s fished more ethically and sustainably—with strict limits on industrial fishing and greater protection for habitats and species—the seafood on supermarket shelves, fishmonger counters, and restaurant menus will no doubt be different from what we see today. Costs will go up for some products, reflecting more accurately the true costs of production; some will be harder to come by, and some will be gone altogether; other alternative, affordable, and sustainable varieties will appear. And none of that is entirely new or unheard of. Seafood markets have always shifted, and consumers have adapted to different foods and prices. I remember that, during my childhood, salmon was an occasional treat and not the cheap dish it’s become with the industrialisation of fish farming. Conversely, in the nineteenth century in Europe and North America, some of the cheapest, most abundant seafoods eaten by the masses were oysters and lobsters.
Completely new options are also being invented for seafood that’s never been anywhere near the ocean. As part of the growing alternative-protein industry attempting to wean people off planet-damaging meat and fish, start-up companies are producing laboratory-grown seafood. Companies in California are investing millions in growing sushi-grade bluefin tuna and coho salmon sashimi. In 2023, an Israeli food-tech company partnered with a Singapore-based enterprise to give diners their first taste of 3D-printed fillets of grouper. There are also regional specialities in the works, from Russian sturgeon to fish swim bladders for traditional fish-maw soup in Hong Kong. Lobster, mahi-mahi, yellowtail, and shrimp are also on the alt-protein menu, although for now mostly behind closed doors.
The manufacturing process involves taking small samples of cells from living fish or crustaceans and growing them in vats, called bioreactors, and feeding them liquid nutrients. The resulting cell culture is then either shaped, on an edible fillet-shaped scaffold, or turned into bio-ink and squirted into desired shapes using a 3D printer.
Assuming these ventures get regulatory approval, there will be early adopters among ethically minded and adventurous diners, but the big question is whether a critical mass of consumers will join the ocean-free seafood party. It’s a stretch to expect high enough volumes will be produced to ease pressure on wild fisheries, and the ventures could backfire and stimulate greater overall demand for seafood. And if this is going to become the next big thing, prices will have to come down; the nutrient feeds are expensive, and the production processes use a lot of energy. In 2019, one company produced a plate of eight shrimp dumplings at a cost of more than twenty thousand dollars per pound, compared to less than five per pound for shrimp reared in aquaculture ponds; another start-up produced a two-hundred-dollar salmon sushi roll.
New technologies will also help consumers of wild and farmed seafood to know exactly what they’re eating, where it came from, and who caught it. Blockchain is now being tested to eradicate widespread fisheries fraud. Originally created for managing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain creates an incorruptible digital ledger that keeps records of transactions from fishers to retailers and consumers, which will eventually prevent the smuggling of illegal and unsustainable seafood into the market. Current estimates indicate that around a third of wild-caught fish imported into the United States is caught illegally, but consumers have no way of knowing the provenance of most of the seafood they buy.
With all that’s available now and in the future, it should be possible for seafood diners to choose from a broad array of species caught and carefully farmed; there will be good-value food available from low-impact, regenerative ocean farms and from fisheries that are properly managed, with well-enforced regulations governing the types of fishing gear used and the times and places where fishing happens, to ensure habitats aren’t damaged and wild populations are not depleted.
How to Use Ocean Resources
In the Pacific Ocean, more than a hundred miles off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, a shipful of research scientists recently found a giant underwater volcano with shimmering warm water seeping out of it. Almost a mile beneath the surface, the seamount’s summit was covered in colourful forests of deep-sea corals and sponges, and among them were nestled giant golden egg cases, each more than a foot long. Flying up from the deeper abyss was a spiny skate, a ghostly-white, diamond-shaped relative of the flapper skates of the Atlantic and likewise more than six feet long. The scientists soon saw this was a female, because she had an egg case emerging from her body—the first time anyone had seen a skate in the process of laying her egg in the deep sea. Thousands more skates joined her on the seamount. Although the total number was impossible to count, the team estimated that one million, perhaps even five million, skate eggs were laid on that seamount. The female skates likely migrate to this spot from great distances across the Pacific basin, knowing this is the place to come for warm waters that are just the right temperature to incubate their eggs and speed their growth; otherwise, it takes three years or longer for them to hatch in cold waters of the deep ocean.
At around the same time, southwards in the Pacific off the coast of Costa Rica, another team of scientists were studying a previously unexplored seamount when they came across a deep-sea octopus nursery, only the fourth ever found. Hundreds of mauve-coloured octopus mothers lay across the flanks of the mountain, more than nine thousand feet underwater, their suckered arms wrapped over their bodies, protecting their egg clutches from predators. The scientists watched as coin-size baby octopuses emerged from their eggs and swam away with pulses of their eight tiny arms.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific on its northwestern rim, a research team has been studying the first seamount to be successfully mined. Rocky crusts on underwater volcanoes are a target for deep-sea mining companies eager to begin exploiting them for the metals they contain, in particular cobalt. In 2020, in the waters of Japan, more than a mile deep, a small part of the Takuyo-Daigo Seamount was drilled and extracted by a fifteen-ton, remotely operated mining machine that looked like a digger on caterpillar tracks, with a twenty-inch-wide cutter head. During less than two hours, the machine mined four hundred feet of the seamount’s surface and removed fourteen hundred pounds of crust.
The test mine was trifling in size compared to the full-scale commercial operations that are planned. And yet, scientists surveying the site before and after the test saw that the ecosystem had been drastically altered. As expected, squashed, dead wildlife, including corals, sponges, and sea cucumbers, lay in the path of the crawling machine. Far more shocking, a year later, the area surrounding the mined site was still substantially depleted of life. Fish and shrimp were around half as abundant as before the test. They’d been scared off and not come back, long after the machine was taken away and the scene had quietened, presumably because the area was still too disturbed and their prey too contaminated. Studies of the small test set off loud alarm bells that mining seamounts would be even more devastating to deep-sea life than had been thought previously.
Amid a constant stream of discoveries of life in the ocean, it’s plain to see that deep-sea mining would be catastrophic for the health and vibrancy of the planet. As researchers explore and study more of the deep, the stakes become ever higher, as they uncover vital habitats on which species depend and see how everything matters—each seamount, each hydrothermal vent, each square foot of abyssal plain.
The year 2023 marked a turning point in plans to begin mining the deep sea. At a series of key meetings at the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica, deep-sea mining companies anticipated receiving a green light to commence their commercial operations. Out in the high seas, the seabed is officially the common heritage of humanity—it is a natural asset shared among everyone alive today and with future generations to come—and the ISA is the organisation charged with deciding on behalf of all humanity whether to permit deep-sea mining, and how, when, and by whom.c Companies hungry to start turning a profit from deep-sea mining were met at the ISA’s meetings in 2023 with a growing wall of opposition. More than twenty nations are calling for a pause or moratorium on the industry. Canada, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Costa Rica are among the countries urging the ISA stop the rush to begin mining;d Palau, Fiji, Samoa, and the Federated States of Micronesia have formed a moratorium alliance; the European Parliament has called for a moratorium; and the French Parliament voted in favour of a full ban on the industry.e
Joining the chorus of concern are the voices of indigenous peoples whose lives are closely entwined with the areas nearest the potential first wave of mining sites in the Pacific. Campaigners presented a declaration to the ISA signed by more than one thousand representatives from thirty-four Pacific countries and fifty-six indigenous groups who collectively deny their consent to deep-sea mining. In the words of the declaration:
Cultures across the Pacific consider the ocean to be sacred space for creation, a provider, an ancestor, and a link to places and people across the horizon. We would no more harm the ocean than we would a member of our family. And as with our family, we depend on each other for survival. … We refuse to allow any further harm to our sacred ocean.
Corporate backers and partners, seeing which way the wind is blowing, have been exiting the deep-sea mining industry, including Lockheed Martin and the shipping giant Maersk, which sold all its shares in the Metals Company. International corporations pledging not to use metals from the deep in their supply chains include Google, battery manufacturer Samsung SDI, and car makers Volvo, Volkswagen, and BMW, stating environmental concerns as a major reason for steering clear of the industry.
At the July 2023 meeting in Jamaica, following ardent calls from member states to debate the issue of a moratorium, ISA officials finally agreed that when talks resumed in 2024 they would, for the first time, allow formal discussions about environmental safeguarding and the possibility of a precautionary pause in deep-sea mining. The ISA also resisted pressure from a few vocal countries and companies to permit mining to start right away and kicked the issue two years down the line. A provisional deadline of July 2025 was set for completing the regulations that would oversee deep-sea mining. Known as the mining code, this contentious document has already been a work in progress for many years. Technically, mining can commence only once those regulations are in place. There is still a possibility a company will apply for a full mining licence from the ISA before the code is finalised, exploiting a legal loophole created in 2020 by the Micronesian island nation of Nauru in partnership with the Metals Company, intended to accelerate their mining plans. But any premature applications would not necessarily be approved, and so there is no smooth path open for mining to begin imminently.
Crucially, the mining code would dictate how mining can be managed to avoid harming the ocean environment, which is a key responsibility of the ISA. Hundreds of scientists around the world agree that it will take an absolute minimum of ten years of dedicated, independent, well-funded global research to gather enough data to even begin considering whether it’s possible to responsibly mine the deep sea.
A long list of important topics and questions needs investigating. Even the simplest matter of cataloguing the species that exist in the deep will require immense, coordinated research programmes. There are more difficult questions to investigate to reveal how deep-sea ecosystems work. How do deep-sea corals reproduce? (Nobody has ever seen one spawning.) Why do so many species visit seamounts, and how important are they for the functioning of the entire ocean?
We also need to understand much better the impacts of mining huge areas of seabed—individual mines would excavate hundreds of square miles of the abyss each year and operate nonstop for decades, and dozens of these mines would be operating simultaneously. This is not a simple matter of questioning whether mining will impact the ocean—it’s obvious that it would cause widespread, irreversible damage by removing habitat and killing species. The key challenge is to fully grasp just how bad those impacts would be. How much would deep-sea mining worsen the climate crisis by interfering with stores of carbon in the seabed and altering the ocean’s ability to sequester more carbon from the atmosphere? What will whales and other megafauna do when their migration routes become noisy and polluted? How much pollution will mining stir up, including toxic heavy metals and radioactive particles from polymetallic nodules? Already studies suggest human food webs will be contaminated, as fish such as tuna swim through the areas earmarked for mining, and it would become more of a problem as the ocean warms and more populations are expected to shift into mined zones.
As deep-sea research continues, arguments in favour of deep-sea mining will continue to weaken. The main focus of pro-mining campaigns has been the demand for certain metallic elements to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles. Electrifying global fleets of cars and trucks would no doubt require immense amounts of resources, including a lot of metal. However, it’s highly premature to presume which metals will be in greatest demand in the years ahead.
Building batteries for electric vehicles is one of the world’s fastest-paced industries. New designs are frequently being released as manufacturers compete to make the most affordable, fast-charging, long-lasting batteries. And the metals they use are quickly changing. Until a couple of years ago, industry talk focused on cobalt, a key element in early-generation hybrid and electric cars. This deeply problematic metal is produced in mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in an industry with a disastrous human rights record. Prospective deep-sea miners declared their virtuous intentions of sidestepping that horrendous industry and instead extracting cobalt from the deep. Now, however, electric car batteries are being built that contain little or no cobalt. The metals that could be extracted from the deep sea, including cobalt and lithium, can be swapped out. Chinese manufacturers are releasing the first car batteries made from sodium, a metal that is not in limited supply and won’t be dug up from the deep sea.
In ten years, the world will be a very different place. Vehicle technologies will have progressed beyond anything that exists today. Scientists will have continued making mind-blowing discoveries in the ocean, uncovering species nobody imagined, and learnt so much more about the inner workings of these vast, interconnected living spaces that help make life possible everywhere else on the planet. With the tide turning on the deep-sea mining industry, and ever more people realising just what’s at stake, hope is growing that swaths of the living ocean that could have ended up being sacrificed for the profit of a few will instead be saved for the benefit of everyone.
Living together on this blue planet, we are all ocean people. We all depend on healthy seas for the air we breathe, for the falling rain, for the liveable world we inhabit. For millions of people, a healthy ocean means food and jobs. It is within reach of every one of us to be a force for good in the ocean and join the growing movement to keep ocean life as vibrant and abundant as possible, even while the Anthropocene swiftly changes around us.
A starting place is at home, wherever that is. The choices we all make as consumers are important. Express your buying power at the checkout counter; support ethical, responsible businesses; ask questions about where products have come from, how they were made, and who made them. Get informed and help others in your life do the same.
If you choose to eat seafood, you have a direct line between your body and the ocean, and you can decide to use that link in a positive way. You can seek out the options that tread most lightly on sea life and give your business to the people working hardest to make a sustainable, ethical living from the ocean.
Support businesses that are part of the emerging circular economy and are offering alternative ways of producing and consuming goods, including rental rather than ownership, repair instead of throwing away. See how you can cut back on plastic packaging; there are ever more companies out there trying to help you do that.
Much of this takes effort, money, and time, which you won’t always have—none of us do. So make sure you feel good when you can make better choices, and try not to feel guilty when you can’t.
Recognise that the actions you take do matter, though they can go only so far. None of us can save the ocean by ourselves. But you can reach out wider. Look to your networks and find ways to influence them. Now that environmental activism has gone mainstream, every office, every school, every industry has people who want to make a difference and do better for the planet. Find them, join them, be one of the leaders.
When it comes to the food you eat and the products you buy, you can exert your influence higher up the supply chain. Supermarkets have immense power. They decide where so much of our food comes from, and they do shift their ways when consumers pile on the pressure. Use social media to name and shame companies that are filling the ocean with pointless plastics. Join campaigns that are calling out the worst offenders and demanding change. In Britain and Germany, supermarkets responding to environmental campaigns are putting pressure on the European Union to improve its tuna fisheries in the Indian Ocean. France wouldn’t have banned plastic-wrapped fresh produce if supermarket customers hadn’t been up in arms. These kinds of campaigns can and do work.
It is critical for the ocean, and the whole living planet, that carbon emissions are cut as soon and as deeply as possible. Already, there’s a global campaign underway to starve fossil fuel corporations of capital. Influential organisations and institutions, from churches and pension funds to universities and banks, are phasing out their investments in the industry. Leaders include the French bank Crédit Mutuel, which in 2020 divested all its fossil fuel financing; other banks making major divestments include the German Deutsche Bank and the State Bank of India. After a five-year campaign by students, academics, and politicians, the University of Cambridge pledged in 2020 to divest its £3.5 billion endowment from fossil fuel corporations by the end of the decade, and many other British universities are making similar commitments. Among American universities, Harvard University announced in 2021 it will move to divest its $42 billion endowment from fossil fuels; other divestors include New York, Cornell, Boston, and Brown Universities. You can be part of this by supporting the businesses and groups that are boldly pushing back against fossil fuel dominance. And if you work in a business or organisation with capital to invest, be part of this push and join the movement.
The future of the ocean will be determined at the coasts and far inland, in assembly halls, boardrooms, and voting booths. Next time you step up to vote, do so as if the environment matters. Call on your elected representatives. Their job is to stand up for constituents like you and take your views seriously.
We all live in a world with an ocean full of remarkable, beautiful, and strange living things, creatures we can dream about and maybe see one day. We can all feel the same sorrow when those wonders are allowed to fade away, and we can all take action to push towards a better future. My greatest source of hope comes from knowing that ever more people are embracing this idea and strengthening the connections between us all and the edges of the land and out into the wide, wild ocean.
a It’s not entirely clear how the lagoon water can be cooled enough to make a difference for residents without chilling and killing off the corals at the same time.
b According to the World Bank, the average gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the Maldives in 2021 was just over $10,000.
