For a vast stretch of the planet’s last untouched frontier, one of the world’s most important elections will take place later this month—and it’s one that you’ve probably never heard of.
That’s because this frontier lies thousands of miles below the ocean’s surface, where the seafloor holds riches: lost shipwrecks, buried chests of gold, sunken cities. But these shadowy depths also conceal a different kind of treasure: a potential mother lode of the battery minerals that some mining companies and countries are desperate to seize.
They can’t exploit them—yet—as seabed mining in international waters is currently prohibited. But a little-known agency affiliated with the United Nations is working furiously to write the rulebook for the nascent, and controversial, industry. Depending on whom you ask, it’s a venture that could wreak havoc on unknown ecosystems; produce the necessary minerals to power the global energy transition; or help world powers wrest control of China-free critical mineral supply chains. Billions of dollars, of course, are also at stake.
Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer, wants to lead the obscure yet powerful organization at the heart of these debates.
That agency is the International Seabed Authority (ISA), and it’s electing its next leader at the end of July. Established under the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and a related implementation agreement in 1994, the ISA is an autonomous international organization made up of all the states parties to UNCLOS. There are currently 169 members (168 states plus the European Union).
The organization rarely makes global headlines from its perch in Kingston, Jamaica, but it is charged with regulating a potentially massive new industry that doesn’t yet exist—and the person at its helm is set to play a highly influential role in shaping its future.
That’s why I wanted to talk to Carvalho. She and her only opponent, current ISA Secretary-General Michael Lodge—a British lawyer who has been criticized for allegedly having cozy ties to eager mining firms—have outlined starkly different visions for the potential sector, with environmentalists favoring Carvalho and companies largely backing Lodge.
I spoke with Carvalho twice, once in late June and once in July, at a time when she was busy on the campaign trail and the leadership race had taken a scandalous turn, including allegations of a covert effort to coax her into pulling out.
A scientist, Carvalho has a no-nonsense manner—a demeanor that was likely molded by her work at the U.N. Environment Program and, before that, a nearly two-decade stint at Brazil’s Environment Ministry. In Brazil, she said, “I was very much in the battlefield with the fossil fuel producers and the car producers and trying to find a common ground on how to reconcile the timing of the industry, the resilience of the environment, and, of course, the economic aspect.”
If the next battlefield is for the deep sea, can Carvalho prevail?
Greenpeace activists organize a protest at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on March 29, 2017. Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images
Carvalho’s affinity for the ocean can be traced back to her birthplace of Rio de Janeiro, a lively coastal city in Brazil that lies some 2,000 miles away from the sprawling Amazon rainforest. It’s an environment rich in both ecosystems and powerful extractive industries, one where clashes over the natural world seem embedded in the country’s national identity.
“It’s just an intrinsic part of our lives in Brazil, I would say, not only because we are immersed in a very interesting geography with a very fantastic biodiversity,” Carvalho said. “This is a very important element in the national debate, so it’s part of the national politics as well.”
During our conversations, Carvalho sometimes sounded as if she was just itching to be closer to the sea. She loves to scuba dive, she told me, and revels in the “fantastic feeling” of being underwater, when the ocean drowns out any surrounding noise and makes it really, really quiet. Even cruises don’t quite do the trick. The one time she boarded one, “I was so disappointed because you cannot connect with the sea” and “you don’t really interact,” she said. “I never took another cruise in my life.”
She knows the ocean better than most. With a bachelor’s and master’s degree in oceanography and sustainable development, respectively, Carvalho’s first job out of college involved boarding a vessel and investigating the sustainability of exploration and exploitation activities in Brazil’s exclusive economic zone, or the 200-nautical-mile (or 230-mile) ocean stretch allotted to coastal states.
That would lay the groundwork for her time at the Environment Ministry, where, ultimately as director of environmental quality in industry, she worked at “the interface between the environmental protection and the industry” in areas including oil, gas, pesticide use, chemical production, and waste management.
“If you look into the oil and gas offshore exploitation and exploration framework, fossil fuels, fuel quality, the car industry—all of them crossed my desk at certain points,” she said. “I have my fingerprints on all of this.”
Leticia Carvalho in New York on June 28. Natalie Keyssar/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
For Carvalho, who now helms the U.N. Environment Program’s Marine and Freshwater Branch out of Nairobi, making the jump to the ISA represents a logical next step in a career spent reconciling business interests with concerns about sustainability and environmental protection. She’s also running at a time when the agency is facing some of its biggest pressures yet to finalize a mining rulebook, all while grappling with a long list of regulatory, environmental, financial, and technological questions—including over whether the industry itself will ever take off.
It’s now crunch time for the ISA as companies and countries clamor for mining access, with one of its most aggressive proponents, The Metals Company (TMC), outlining plans to submit an mining application by the end of this year regardless of whether regulations are already in place. Eager to secure new mineral supply chains, world powers, too, are increasingly eyeing the potential riches.
But not everyone is so enthusiastic. At least 27 countries have called for a moratorium, a precautionary pause, or an outright ban on deep-sea mining—in international waters, national waters, or both—citing the need for more time to wrangle environmental, financial, and regulatory challenges. They have been joined by a handful of major automakers, which would use deep-sea minerals in their electric vehicles, as well as more than 800 marine science and policy experts who signed a letter urging a pause until there is “sufficient and robust scientific information” to determine whether mining can occur “without significant damage to the marine environment and, if so, under what conditions.”
“It is a hugely pivotal moment” for the ISA, said Diva Amon, a marine biologist and one of the letter’s signatories. This election “will essentially determine how the next few years progress at a very, again, critical time for this potentially emerging industry.”
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A hand with a blue beaded bracelet holds a lump-of-coal-sized mineral nodule. - The Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron holds a nodule brought up from the seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean in San Diego on June 28, 2021. Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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A bowl of blue-gray-toned mineral-rich nodules. - Black polymetallic sea nodules—mineral deposits rich with nickel, manganese, and cobalt—are displayed at the National Institute of Ocean Technology in Chennai, India, on Dec. 22, 2022. Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images
Thousands of miles below the ocean’s surface, in one of the few areas of the planet still shrouded in mystery, new discoveries are shedding light on just how much scientists still have to learn about life in the deep sea. In one of the most recent breakthroughs, researchers found that the deep sea potentially offers a source of oxygen beyond photosynthesis—a discovery that could shape our understanding of the very origins of life.
These findings also underscore the debate at the heart of the leadership race between Lodge and Carvalho: Should countries and companies move full speed ahead in tapping the ocean’s mineral riches—which would help power the energy transition—or is more time necessary to understand how industrial-scale mining could impact this remote territory?
Even as TMC pledges to submit a mining application by the end of the year, the ISA has said that regulations will not be finalized within that timeframe. The ISA Council aims to adopt regulations at its next session, which would take place in 2025, ISA Council President Olav Myklebust said in a press briefing on Friday.
Carvalho stresses that if she is elected, the agency’s member states would still be in the driver’s seat in determining when and how to begin mining and that she would “do what the member states asked me to do.” But she also believes that the completion of regulations must precede any industrial operations. “In my opinion, personally, the mining code is a necessary condition for the beginning of the commercial activities,” she said.
She would also push for more independent research, instead of what she sees as an overreliance on data that has been collected by mining contractors. “If you are a contractor, of course you have a particular interest, and probably you will focus your research on that element of your interest,” she said. “The source of information matters. I’m not saying that the information there is not good. What I’m saying is [it’s] not enough for the decision-making.”
“I would say, easily at this point in time, that we don’t have all the information that is needed in terms of the understanding of the functionality of the ecosystems in the deep sea,” Carvalho added.
It’s a markedly different approach from Lodge’s, who has characterized the impacts of mining as “predictable and manageable.” In the ISA press briefing on Friday, Lodge, who has an extensive background in the law of the sea, stressed that his personal views on whether mining should begin in the absence of regulations are “absolutely irrelevant.” But he has also called for the agency to complete the regulatory framework sooner rather than later. “It has taken many decades to reach where we are today,” Lodge said at the United Nations in June, adding that “The most important task of ISA is to complete the regulatory framework for deep-sea mining in a timely and responsible manner.”
Michael Lodge, the secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority, in his office at One U.N. Plaza in New York on Aug. 30, 2021. Ashley Gilbertson/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
Lodge has also been critical, if somewhat dismissive, of calls for a mining moratorium, which he described as a “publicity stunt by some NGOs” in an interview with Foreign Policy in 2022. The ISA is charged with promoting greater marine scientific research, so “imposing a moratorium seems a somewhat Luddite way of approaching that because you won’t get any more science—you’ll get less science,” he said. “It seems to me very incoherent.”
Pradeep Singh, an expert in deep-sea mining at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany, said that after Lodge’s eight years in office, he commands “quite a bit of respect.” Singh added: “I think some states see that he’s the candidate that could deliver on this transition from exploration to exploitation, which was something that he really sort of also seized upon for his election back in 2016.”
Now, Lodge likely “feels that there’s still some unfinished business that he wants to deliver on,” Singh said.
But Lodge has also faced fierce criticism for allegedly being too cozy with the mining companies, with the ISA reportedly sharing key data with them under his tenure. Diplomats have questioned whether he has acted neutrally in overseeing the regulatory scramble, as an ISA chief is supposed to.
The ISA Secretariat rejected these allegations. “As an autonomous international organization, ISA and its staff members, including the Secretary-General, follow the most rigorous standards of international good governance and management,” the secretariat said in a statement to Foreign Policy, adding that regulation negotiations have been taking place for more than 10 years now “in a reasoned, deliberate way and following at each stage the most rigorous standards of international governance.”
“The Secretary-General categorically denies any insinuations of inappropriate relationships with contractors, which represent an unacceptable attempt to degrade the integrity of ISA and its dedicated staff without credible evidence,” the secretariat said.
An inside look at an Indian deep-ocean exploration vehicle under development as part of Samudrayaan (Ocean Craft) program at the National Institute of Ocean Technology in Chennai on Dec. 22, 2022.Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images
The race for the ISA’s next chief took a scandalous turn after my first conversation with Carvalho, when the New York Times published a report detailing a covert effort to convince Carvalho to drop her leadership bid.
This is what allegedly went down: In late June, Teburoro Tito, the U.N. ambassador of the island nation of Kiribati, approached Carvalho with a proposal: withdraw her bid in exchange for a potentially high-level position at the ISA. Tito told the Times that Lodge had approved the offer to ensure his third term in office, though Lodge has denied this.
The report further intensified scrutiny of an election that has already been fraught with allegations of improper payments and misuse of funds. Both Carvalho’s and Lodge’s supporters have accused the other candidate of trying to curry favor through illicit means such as paying delegates’ travel costs, the Times reported. And in May, a former ISA executive filed a complaint with the United Nations accusing Lodge and his top deputy of misusing agency funds.
Lodge strongly refuted the allegations in a statement to the Times. The ISA Secretariat also did so in its statement to Foreign Policy. “With respect to the payment of countries’ travel costs, the Secretariat of ISA has no knowledge of any such proposals,” the secretariat said. “Both as Secretary-General, and as a candidate for election, Mr. Lodge condemns any attempts to influence voting by paying for delegations to attend meetings.”
Carvalho also rejected any accusations of improper behavior in a statement to Foreign Policy. Brazilian diplomacy doesn’t “use this practice,” she said, and “my sponsor country’s team never offered to pay arrears or travel costs.” As the Brazilian government’s sponsored candidate, Brasília issued a presidential decree to support her travels during the campaign, she said, and she has issued a recusal statement with the U.N. Ethics Office in order to campaign.
Yet the incident reflects just how divisive the race for deep-sea mining has become at the ISA, as mining companies, countries, scientists, and big automakers clash over competing visions for the potential industry’s future.
When I asked Carvalho about the alleged job offer a few days later, she said she was shocked—but not entirely surprised—when she received it, having heard rumors about this kind of practice in the past. Tito had offered her a position that does not currently exist, she told me, but that would have been at the “highest level of directorate that you can have in the U.N.” “It was offered as a ‘You take the deputy [position] now, and then four years after, you’ll get your time,’” she said.
Carvalho and other critics contend that Lodge’s very reelection bid bucks some long-standing traditions at the ISA. First, there’s the fact that his current candidacy was sponsored by Kiribati—not his country of citizenship, the United Kingdom, as is typical. Like other U.N. organizations, the ISA also traditionally follows a rotational understanding in leadership transitions, meaning that different regional groups take turns at the helm of the agency. This year, it would be Latin America and the Caribbean’s turn.
Carvalho, who was nominated by Brazil, is eager to underscore this point. “I’m not saying that [Lodge’s] candidacy is illegal, but I’m saying that my candidacy builds upon a number of elements” of the multilateral order’s legitimacy, she said. “I’m a national of my country. I’m not being sponsored by another country that I am not a citizen [of].”
Kiribati’s nomination of Lodge has also raised eyebrows because the island is partnered with TMC—the same company that is eager to submit a mining application by the end of this year. Lodge’s ties to TMC have been heavily scrutinized since he appeared in the mining company’s promotional video in 2018; TMC has reportedly also received key data from the ISA under Lodge’s leadership.
In a statement to Foreign Policy, TMC said it did not have a preferred candidate in the race. “TMC had no involvement in selecting or supporting any candidate and only learned of Kiribati’s nomination of Mr. Lodge after it was publicly announced,” TMC CEO Gerard Barron said. “Our focus remains on developing our Environmental Impact Statement for the first commercial nodule exploitation contract, and we look forward to future engagement with the successful candidate.”
The Kiribati ambassador’s job offer, Carvalho said, has crystallized what she sees as her primary task if she is elected. “Two weeks ago, I would say the biggest challenge is to bridge the divide between member states and the understanding about how and when to finalize the mining code,” she said during our interview in July. “In my view, the biggest challenge now is the governance of ISA itself.”
Still, Carvalho seems ready to dive in. “I see in ISA a challenge of the future,” she said in June. “Now it’s on the eve of changing gears from, let’s say, preparation to action.”
“It’s a fascinating moment,” she added.