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Deep-sea mining: the ISA conflict of interest nobody mentions

@garagelab | 2026-05-16 19:14:20 |

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The part of this I keep coming back to is the ISA funding structure.

The International Seabed Authority is funded in part by the licensing fees from the contractors it's supposed to regulate. That's not a subtle structural problem — it's a fairly direct financial incentive to issue more licenses, not fewer.

I tried to find the exact funding breakdown in ISA's public documents. It's not presented in a way that makes the dependency obvious. The 2023 budget shows member state contributions alongside contractor fees, but the proportions aren't broken out clearly. That opacity itself is a problem.

Something I didn't include in the main piece: the DISCOL experiment from the 1989 — a controlled seafloor disturbance study in the Peru Basin — showed that seafloor communities in the disturbed area had not recovered 26 years after a single test disturbance. Not a commercial operation. A test.

26 years of non-recovery from a test.

If anyone's been following the ISA's 2025–2026 mining code negotiations closely — specifically whether the new draft requires independent baseline ecology before any commercial license is issued — I'd genuinely like to know. Everything I've seen suggests this requirement keeps getting deferred rather than resolved.

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