Sharing the benefits from the global commons: deep-seabed mining with Prof Dale Squires

hello and welcome to the Oxford Martin school thank you very much for coming out on this rainy day it gives me great pleasure to introduce Dale to you today who's going to give our lecture uh Dale is a Marine Economist he works on global ocean issues with International organizations he's an Oxford Martin School visiting fellow on the um program on Wildlife trade and he's here with us for a few weeks and I shall hand over to Dale now thank you very much very good uh well thank you so much for coming out today for a rainy day in such a seemingly obscure topic as deep seabed mining I I have to say I anticipated a much smaller audience now you're going to see that deep sea bed mining is actually extraordinarily topical on the way forward for the clean energy transition and now this presentation uh sharing the benefits from the Global Commons evidence from Deep seabed mining is co-authored with Michael Lodge who's Secretary General of the international seabed Authority uh it germinated with an email from Michael uh four or five years ago Dale come on down to Jamaica got a real quick quick project for you I have some interns just take you a week Famous Last Words we're still working on it uh you know four or five years later but it's turned out to be I would say in my professional career the most interesting thing I've ever done all right now I'm going to put a disclaimer up uh the views are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the international seabed Authority or Avis members and I represent the University of California San Diego uh when you deal with international national government you have to be extraordinarily careful about whom you speak for and in what capacity now so the purpose it's really divided into two parts the first part would be background I will review the deep sea bed mining within the context of the clean energy transition and you're going to see it's actually this is an emerging issue it's extraordinarily controversial it's appearing now New York Times the financial times and so forth uh and it's an area of great consternation and the second part will develop alternative distribution rules for efficient Equitable and fair sharing of royalties and other benefits from Deep Sea bed mining for current and future Generations that maximizes global social welfare now we're going to use precise and theoretically rigorous definitions of efficiency equity and fairness from an established multi-disciplinary lecture these are all very rigorously defined coming mostly out of distributive out of political philosophy and a branch of mathematics called Fair division now it applies to sharing the benefits and costs not just for deep sea bed mining royalties but it serves as sort of a template for other Global common issues these can be vaccines biodiversity food Aid and deep sea bid Celestial high seas fishing genetics and polar resources now keep your eye out on the moon and outer space and other Celestial resources I believe you'll go they'll go down the same path that deep sea bed mining did which we had individual grab grabbed by individual Nations and then the rest of the world caught up with them and said this is the common Heritage of mankind we're gonna there's gonna be a collective interest so what we're talking about here could well portend the next 20 years in outer space so first I'm going to give you a background on deepsea bid mining as I said it's going to be within the context of the minerals intensive clean energy transition and notice minerals intensive we're moving away from a fuels intensive Energy System to a minerals intensive Energy System now deep sea bed mining has three broad basic types and you can see over here one is seamounts for Cobalt Rich Pharaoh manganese crust what hydrothermal vents those are those big vents with all that exotic life way down in the ocean for massive sulfide deposits there's nothing really going on commercially here yet and this is the star of the show these are out in basically in the middle of the ocean in the abyssal plain for what's called polymetal poly metallic nodules uh and which I'll get to in just a moment now you can see on this slide where they're all briefly occurring there's actually got a better slide coming up in a moment where right here in the blue is where the poly metallic nodules are and the action right now is here and over in the South Pacific in here this is where the commercial activity will occur now it's an emerging industry just getting ready and the international seabed Authority is developing regulations for mining really as we speak now as I said we're going to concentrate on poly metallic nodules that are found on the bottom of the ocean floor of the Abyss What's called the Abyssal plane and it looks like this and in person they look like little clumps of coal or about the size of a potato and in it they contain copper Cobalt nickel and manganese so here's a map again and we can see in the South Pacific and over here in the Clarion clipperton Zone uh and these are the two areas where it will occur so this is the deep sea bed mining process you can see there is a it could be a ship it could be a platform there's a transporter vessel that will take the oars and take them to land for processing and then there are these kind of collectors down at the bottom that basically just move along like a vacuum cleaner sort of sucks it up sends them back up here uh to the ship and then they go on the transporting vehicle uh here's one of those little um collectors you can see it's a magnificent photo these I've been on these boats they're they're huge all right they're just massive uh here's another uh collector now it's managed by the international seabed Authority which is headquarters in Jamaica now the area um that they manage it's literally called the area and that's beyond uh it's an area Beyond national jurisdiction uh basically it's beyond 200 nautical miles there's some sort of exceptions to that but it's been on 200 nautical miles now now the question becomes how do we meet future minerals demand and this is an extraordinarily pressing question it's one of the key questions of our time because how it feeds into climate change so I would argue it's close to an existential question minerals demand is expected to grow 400 to 600 percent as the Energy System transitions from a fuels based to a minerals-based system and we're going to have the global Supply chains are going to diversify become more resilient to Global shocks reduce concentrations of mineral suppliers right now they're extremely concentrated and that leads to the last one which is addressing National Security concerns but it also gets down to individual companies particularly the auto companies and the battery companies they will want to build a secure supply all right and they don't want to be um constrained like they found in covid and having these uh Supply constraints now this just gives you an idea the demand for minerals how it varies uh you can see Cobalt uh which and lithium which are very important in this transition um there's different ones here copper seven percent uh that seems low to me from other figures I've read from the International Energy Association but the point is there is a massive increase in demand for minerals as we move into uh a minerals intensive Energy System now one of the issues actually the one of the most controversial issues is do we delay the mineral Supply due to uncertainty and this uncertainty in particular is over deep sea bed mining so now if we delay the clean energy transition to reduce reduce this risk and uncertainty over the minerals impact particularly on the deep sea bed this is comes at the cost of climate related cost climate change related costs and now the increase mineral Supply is inevitable and the only question is going to become where when and how now what are the sources of the future minerals Supply we have the circular economy which is recycling that's where everybody pins their hopes on increased primary terrestrial Supply and increased well starting from zero increased primary deep sea bed Supply now the serial economy will not satisfy all future demand so that means that we'll be left with terrestrial and deep sea bid now those are very different resources you can see the nodules on your left from Deep seabed mining these highly high grade poly metallic nodules have much higher ore content and then we have our land ORS over here with much lower oracore content and as we continue to mine terrestrally we are getting into lower and lower grade deposits naturally they've mine first where it's higher highest concentration so the central question becomes how much Futures future mineral Supply should come from terrestrial Mining and how much from Deep Sea bed Mining and this is a global question which is being debated now in the international seabed Authority uh it is not yet resolved and in the literature you'll in the newspapers popular media you'll see discussions uh going both ways on the pros and cons now I'll lay many of these out right now now what are some of the key differences between deep sea bed and terrestrial mining now there's no free lunch in this all right each comes with its own adverse impacts if we look at Deep Sea bed mining we have environmental impacts we have uncertainty because it's a new industry and little is known about the Deep seabed environment and there's a lot of concern over Extinction risk then there's terrestrial mining it also has an environmental impact and it also has social justice human rights human health child enforced labor and Community displacement impacts deep sea there's no people around it land mining there's people around it and then we also get into a global versus estate deep seabed mining minerals are commonly owned by Humanity most of them are there's some exceptions with global public goods and bads terrestrial mining is owned and occurs in individual states with private goods and public goods and bads and then finally the minerals from either Source enters a global minerals Market now let's look this shows you the deepsea bit mining environmental impacts so you have your uh platform or boat up here you have these uh hydraulic pump systems down here you have this little Rover that goes on the seat so there's pressure Shear forces sediment plumes Extinction wrist and then up here they um put some of the like the sand and stuff that goes around the minerals those are tanley's discharge so these are the sources of those environmental impacts and again there's Extinction risk because they so little is known about what's going on now let's look at the terrestrial Mining and environmental impacts I'm going to do it entirely through photos because it's self-evident there's air pollution water pollution habitat damage environmental and social justice particularly with artisanal mining here you see Cobalt mining that's something like 70 of all the Cobalt produced in the world here you see the Democratic Republic condo here you see an open pit Mining and then up here you see this artisanal small-scale mining you can see a lot of child labor there a lot of Health impacts here's lithium mines in Chile in the vast Salt Flats of the Atacama Desert that also includes Argentina and Bolivia now there there's impacts because it's so water scares up there uh with the existing small scale producers uh you can see right now about half of the lithium comes from Australia then you have Chile Argentina in China in Zimbabwe uh here's nickel mines in Indonesia the largest source of nickel in the world and also uh expected to be the largest future source nickel mining in Russia and rare earth mines most right now is in China uh the mo the countries around the world that are interested in clean uh clean energy transition with minerals are scrambling to reduce their supply to get more resiliency and not be subject to a single supplier nobody wants to be anybody nobody in any country wants to be subject to a single supplier it's it's Universal all right so that's kind of the first half give you an idea give you a background give you a context and give you an idea of what is one of the most important issues of our time to clean energy transition that is related to global climate change and what the sources of the minerals are and some of the controversy now then the second half we'll be talking about how we share these royalties uh equitably and fairly so this is uh has been taken up by the international seabed Authority and this is what Michael and I came up with as a first cut so first let's ask ourselves what do we mean by Justice and Equity I mean everybody's got all these things in their head about what they mean so we're going to first think about Justice is fairness John Rawls who basically resurrected uh political philosophy with distributive justice in the 1960s and 70s said Justice is fairness so we'll start from there but what is fairness well there's a lot of definitions definitions of fairness now first let's look at a concept called Fair Bargains this this popped out of Game Theory now an allocation is a fair bargain when the claimants decide voluntarily directly and consensually now this is the international seabed Authority's decision making which hap which occurs voluntarily self-enforcing and consensually so it's a fair bargain and hold for many other comparable International organizations now this means that the royalty share is allocated to the seabed authorities States parties will be fair shares Now Fair Bargains in turn give fairness as impartiality and then that in turn gives justice as impartiality uh Brian Berry has a very famous book he's kind of the biggest proponent of this uh and it also gives fairness is non-envy which what economists like uh and this would be a case where no State's party prefers the distribution to any other State's party I happen to really like Justice's impartiality for international organizations I work with not just the seabed authority but also on high seas Fisheries uh deep sea bed deep sea as well as tuna Fisheries so for international organizations we can think about because it's almost all of them are consensual we can think about the decisions when they finally emerge it takes forever but when they finally emerge we can think of them as fair and Justice as impartiality now what is equity again many definitions and it depends on what you're looking at now we're not going to consider what constitutes a just global social order which is what the the political philosophers have considered instead we're going to consider what is called equity in the small or local Justice and this is how institutions divide specific types of benefits and burdens it might be organ transplants it might be welfare payments it might be how you distribute housing all these would be instances of local Justice and equity in the small and here we're going to say that Justice and Equity referred to a balanced settlement of different and conflicting claims principles and interests of the ISA the international seabed Authority States parties that satisfy unclose that's it that's the international law of the sea the common Heritage of mankind and the ISA norms and precedent so we have all these conflicting parties with different viewpoints and so Justice and Equity Equity here will be how we balance all of these conflicting interests it'll be fair and then we're going to use equity principles if you like as policy instruments to come up with a balance as you'll see now the commonage Heritage as a mankind is a principle of ethics and international law is an essential element of international law of the sea unclose and it exclusively applies to resources which belie which lie beyond the boundaries of national jurisdiction this is what is this area for the deep sea bed murals that the ISA is in charge of and is considered for the outer space and moon Antarctica biodiversity in this new treaty that will emerge uh BB and J now this creates the area as common property collectively owned by all Humanity now so then we had to decide look all this stuff's written in international law and if anybody ever looked at what the lawyer is right it's great but then you have to implement it we've got to come up with numbers so what does this stuff really mean you have to actually operationalize these kind of broad Concepts it was challenging so we defined all Humanity as constable in individuals which dates back to at least to diogenes the cynic and it's a it's a standard term that you see in international relations and political philosophy so what it really means is freestanding individuals with rights now so in some unclose and the common inherits of mankind establish deep sea bad minerals in the area that's beyond 200 nautical miles Beyond national jurisdiction as common property owned by current and future generations of Cosmopolitan individuals and managed by the seabed authority now there's two rationales for sharing what is this common ownership as I said the area is owned by cosapol individuals of current and future Generations due to the common Heritage of mankind principle but now this introduces this our biggest single problem all right States represent individuals in the international seabed Authority states have legal personality and standing not individuals now we assume individuals are citizens of States not always true there's some but the bulk of humanity is this way so we have this conflict between conceptual and individuals representing all Humanity us and States parties in the ISA that that have the legal personality so this is a you'll see this tension Rising back and forth throughout what we do now the second rationale for sharing is progressivity so we distribute income that is royalties from higher income and wealthier states to lower income less wealthy States this includes benefits for future generations and this was required by the law of the sea articles 142 and 82. so it's written in the international law and we had to Define what that means all right it just says you have to do it so now we turn to specific Equity principles now there's a bunch of different Equity principles how you apply them depends upon the nature of the exogenous rights the entitlements and claims of Cosmopolitan individuals and states and these derive from ownership international law and precedent the nature of the good to be distributed in our in this case royalties and the progressivity in royalty distribution to Cosmopolitan individuals of low-income States represented by these low-income States so as I said the real conundrum here was balancing the individuals with the states conflicting claims we must balance due to the conflicting rights entitlements and claims to the benefits we have the cause of Paul and individuals ownership become property that gives each individual of current and future Generations equal exogenous rights entitlement and claims to benefits and individual states are states parties to the ISA with legal personality not individuals standing juristical Perry that means one state one vote they're equal in the eyes of international law and in partiality under international law that gives each state equal exogenous rights entitlement and claim to benefits now I've been on National delegations to uh not the ISA but in tuna rfmos I've been in treaty negotiations as part of national delegations and I there's a fair amount of juristical parity in the end and there's more than people give credit for now so what we do is we combine different we're going to combine different Equity principles to balance the interests of individual states and Cosmopolitan individuals as I said Equity principles we're not really use them in a moralistic sense we're using them almost they have normative ethical content but we're using them here as policy instruments now so all shares are going to be a hybrid of shares distributed to States royalties are going to be a hybrid of equity principles balancing the conflicting claims of Cosmopolitan individuals and Stage parties now we're going to use Aristotle's Equity principle which is proportionality for a Cosmopolitan individuals so individuals Shares are going to be in proportion to their communist Heritage of mankind ownership rights and claims and we're going to allocate royalty shares to a State state's party to the ISA in proportion to its population out of all total States populations in the ISA but States because of their juristical parity are going to receive equal division so you can already see we have a tension between proportionality where a state has it on their percentage of population and one and equal division for a state now we also have to feed into this mix the unclose mandated progressivity and royalty distribution to individuals of low-income States and so that will give us weighted proportionality for our sharing rules for the cosmopolitans now this what do we mean by progressivity somebody has to make an ethical decision what Progressive is so we're going to need somebody's ethical preferences so we turn to the United Nations and I was arguably the most legitimate representative of all Humanity and we look at their what we call revealed ethical preferences how they actually voted to behave and so we went into their annual member contributions which are based on per capita gross national income of each State's party now uh Nicholas stern of the stern report uh down uh London School of Economics uh many years ago he compared looking at the UK he compared the marginal average tax income tax rates and the more they diverge the more Progressive it is so we computed the marginal tax rate and the average tax rate of States parties to the U.N general assembly and out of that we got a a number for progressivity now we this applies in doing this we apply an equity principle called equal absolute sacrifice and this number is at this there's an economist here it's the elasticity of the social margin utility of welfare of of consumption coming out of a social welfare function now now we also ask ourselves a quality of what we're going to look at two currencies of Justice so one is a quality of outcome so we look at the final outcome how equal is it but we also look at a quality of opportunity which became an issue of concern to political philosophers starting with dorkin later with arneson who's at UC San Diego uh Cohen I believe was at Oxford and they they said we want to look at the quality of operating this really summarizes it right here all right this would be a quality of opportunity and here we're looking at the quality of outcome give everybody the same starting place and we're out of this we're going to distinguish between fair or justifiable and unfair or unjustifiable inequality now let's look at the quality of opportunity which I'll use is EOP so outcome inequalities will be deemed unfair if they're rooted in exogenous circumstances Beyond Cosmopolitan individuals control or responsibility sometimes they call that birth state bad luck you're born in a state that just by chance where the everything's against you and this would be unfair inequality now once opportunities to reach an outcome have been equally allocated which particular opportunity the individual choose chooses then lies beyond the scope of Justice if you want to go out and gamble gamble with your inheritance that's your problem all right if you want to be it's a grasshopper you know in the uh what's the other one anyway if you want to work diligently and say those are your choices after you have a quality of opportunity out of the Starting Gate and this is also another definition of fairness now there's a concept called exante compensation for these Cosmopolitan individuals due to the inequality from um circumstances we should eliminate it so we have this idea of the developing State concept Cosmopolitan circumstances beyond their control what they call birth state bad luck now how do we ex-ante compensate in these International organizations is not practicable to assess higher income States parties to ex-anti compensate lower income States parties and thereby their cause of pollens it doesn't doesn't work that way in international organizations it's really hard to make transfer payments so we used a quality of opportunity and a quality of outcome distribution weights to implicitly tax an ex-anti compensate developing State cause importance for the birth state inequality of opportunity first state bad luck now these distribution weights will increase or decrease the benefit size to implement implement this unclose mandated equity and distribution for developing State Cosmopolitan individuals so in some we have unclose mandated priority and exoptee compensation for developing state cosmopolitans for differential exogenous circumstances for with for them without responsibility choice or effort first state bad luck and we will Ex Auntie compensate them using two different distribution weights for distributed royalty shares traditional equality of opportunity outcome weights which I'll show you in a moment and propose the quality of opportunity weights and this will directly incorporate distributive justice for constipulans into the distribution rule rather than Bayesian distributive justice solely on the final outcome of the distributive benefit now let's look at the allocation formula for royalty shares so here we're going to look at a quality of outcome weighted proportionality so this s i is the share of royalties that goes to a state it'll be between zero and one this is the this numerator is the amount they receive this is the sum of all which turns it into proportion and it has two terms here the first term represents constipolent in individuals they're represented by their State's parties so it's at States parties share of the total population of all Isa members and that gets that Aristotle's proportionality principle then this is our distribution weight now the numerator is the per capita gross national income average for all the state's parties the denominator is each individual states parties per capita gross national income so if you're poor then your per capita gross national income is less than the average that makes this ratio greater than one if you're rich this denominator exceeds the numerator and it's less than one and it gives less weight to the royalties royalty shares received by a rich Nation now it's raised to this progressivity parameter ETA and we calculated one out of the um uh uh the United Nations General Assembly now it could be zero that would be utilitarianism where you don't care about the distribution and it could even be Infinity which be John rolls where you um a difference principle where you just care uh you give maximum concern to the the worst off we found one which is mildly Progressive so we're going to take each State's pot share of total population and weight it by this so if it's if you're poor this this is greater than one if you're rich this is less than one and you get a little bit more a little bit less and we found by some um additional work that this drives everything all right it turns out the distribution weight um has a lot less impact I was surprised had a lot less impact than I thought um and we look by the way uh you know different states parties asked us to look at different variables and so forth and uh we did and we found uh we stuck with this we found that it really didn't change things very much now we also looked at the quality of outcome weighted proportionality with a floor and a ceiling so a minimum maximum amount each individual stage party can receive the floor or minimum distributions came from the UN General Assembly annual member contributions again we're appealing to arguably the most legitimate body representing all Humanity and then we looked our ceiling our maximum distributions they came from the international CE bet Authority turned out to be Japan um in the United States is the largest one in you in general assembly and while the United States signed it never ratified the law of the sea and hence they are not member it didn't come into force and they are not members of the international seabed Authority so we had a maximum minimum and then now so then the first time we presented this all right we basically we basically presented this and we got an incredible range which I'll show you in a little while India got something like 30 percent so the guy from India was there and you know he's got a smile on him like the Cheshire Cat and he's thinking Life's good he's quiet you know he's thinking this this is working out pretty well and then you get into the small island developing stage you got a zero point and seven or eight zeros before you get to theirs now the represent the delegate from Tonga was a mathematician had been a finance minister Central Banker he understood and the other states are looking around this isn't fair he said oh my God I read our first cut we're thinking well it is fair for cosmopolitan individuals but we ran ahead into this conflict this Perpetual this conflict which is at the heart of all of how we've devised these rules which is between all Humanity Cosmopolitan individuals and the fact that in the under the eyes of international law with the exception of humanitarian law only States parties have legal personality and standing all right so we got this conflict and if you States party with juristical parity you want even division so we got this conflict so one of the ways we address that was this floor and ceiling another way was we came up with a different functional form this is uh called a aggregator index it's like Consumer Price Index people have studied these things forever and this one's called the geometric mean it has all kinds of nice properties and basically all we've done is put an exponent all right in this case two terms each one is the exponent of one half and what it does is it really compresses the distribution it gives a smaller range between minimum and maximum shares a larger minimum share and a smaller maximum share so India went from like you know 30 percent down to eight percent it was really dramatic I I was again surprised by this so and then the states want equal division so 1 divided by 167 for the number of states parties 168 if you include the European Union but we excluded them so now so remember we have a quality of outcome for these cosmopolitans by these distribution weights but we also have a quality of opportunity in distribution weights and so we use the same the way it's different I'm not going to go into it here but we use all those formulas I just showed you for a quality of outcome distribution weights we use a different weight for a quality of opportunity now before I give you to the empirical results so we've we've got fairness that's and that's going to lead we're going to have justice as impartiality and we're using Equity principles to balance the interests which have ethical normative ethical content to balance Cosmopolitan individuals with Stage parties and now so we've got Equity Equity built in and there's more Equity to come and finally we have economic efficiency now these Shares are what we call Prado efficient which is a definition of efficiency for each formula because a reallocation from one state to another requires a loss by the relinquishing state so all those by Def all shares by definition are Pareto efficient efficient now now we come to the empirical results so first let's look at these two figures then I'll look at this stuff up on top so these are just the distributions so you range from zero all the way out to a little over 0.3 this was India on that first Formula and that's when we presented to everybody all right and you know he loves it and everybody else is looking at that and they go we're way down here seven or eight zeros I mean this doesn't compute so here you can see all the different formulas how how and what happens when we use that geometric mean formula it just shoved everything in and that's the largest value there India gets 0.8 now so then now then we remember we have States parties so we're looking at the equality of outcome for the distributed royalty shares to the state's parties forget the individuals for the moment States parties are looking at this stuff making the decision so this is called a Lorenz curve so this is you make all the distributions now this straight line is perfect equity and that's what you get by the way equal division for each stage party everything here is in terms of the state's parties forget the Cosmopolitan individuals and then we have some of these others there are more formulas here but these are the most representative ones now the closer you are to this diagonal line the greater the equality of outcome for States parties so you this is the two geometric mean formulas whether a quality of outcome or quality of opportunity for the on the distribution weights for the Cosmopolitan individuals and they cross that means they you cannot distinguish between the two so these two the geometric mean weighted proportional quality of outcome or quality of opportunity for cosmopolitans are our preferred um formula they balance between the quality for contrapultans and equality for States parties now so here's what we're balancing we have Cosmopolitan Equity through proportionality a quality of outcome a quality of opportunity in those distribution weights and progressivity also baked into the distribution weights and hence baked into distribution rules all deontologicalism when you it's a rule-based sense of justice we have the state's party Equity through equal division and equality and a quality of outcome which were achieved by the functional form the geometric mean and these ex post Equity metrics and there's a lot of other Equity metrics and I applied them they all gave consistent rankings all right now we turn our so we've looked at Equity within a generation when we distribute these royalty shares now remember though our cause are all Humanity which we've defined as Cosmopolitan individuals are both current and future Generations so we have to think about intergenerational Equity now how do future Generations exercise their ownership rights and Associated benefits claim is through current Generations and they either leave an equitable share of the resource in C2 for future Generations extraction or they take the royalties and they save and invest them to increase future Generations consumption by reducing current consumption so you get a trade-off between current and future consumption now we have Global public goods also help meet Generations claims so the royalties will fund direct provision of global public goods capacity building scientific research climate change victims whatever the ISA decides and you could also fund like a sovereign wealth fund we called which could be called the seabed sustainability fund and in the future they can directly provide benefits or directly provide public goods you can also do it through social discount rate which is how much you discount future benefits and costs uh there was a contract with Ben groomed from Exeter who developed it and then maximum global social welfare requires efficiently equitably and fairly balancing these public goods for current and future Generations and there's no mathematical formula for that that would that will come entirely down to the ISA all right I'm almost done I know there's been a lot to digest so this is the take-home message we have Fair Equitable and efficient intra and intergenerational benefit sharing all these rules are fair Equitable and efficient it's remarkable Justice and fairness is impartiality and also Envy freeness due to the ISA decision making the resulting local distributive justice or equity in a small it's a hybrid balancing the cause of potence through the distribution rules the ontologicalism and States parties to the final outcome consequentialism two currencies of Justice a quality of opportunity for the state's parties and the final distribution and a quality of opportunity and equality of outcome for the cause of Paul and individuals in the sharing rules and we've we saw this gives the same final consequentialist outcome for States parties and maximizes global social welfare what Equity principles we use all formula use equity principles to X Auntie balance the conflicting rights entitlements claims principles and interests of Cosmopolitan individuals common Heritage of mankind Collective ownership that was Aristotle's Equity or proportionality principle Cosmopolitan individuals unclose mandated equity and distribution for developing States we have priority weighted proportionality equal absolute sacrifice equality of outcome a quality of opportunity and dessert and we have individual states parties individual International organizational legal personality standing juristical parity and impartiality represented by equal Division and equality of outcome and last slide so this makes contributions to international law and Global Collective action through International organizations we developed economies of the common Heritage of mankind we Define all Humanity as current and future Cosmopolitan individuals we distinguish Cosmopolitan individuals from States parties and international organizations on the basis of legal personality and standing under international law international law places really big constraints of whatever you're doing here and we Define unclose mandated equity and distribution developing States we introduced and operationalized equality of opportunity we have a hybrid of deontologicalism for cosmopolitan individuals because everything's baked into the rules and consequentialism for States parties where everything's baked into the quality of outcomes and that gives our martia's sins distributive justice is Naya that's a Sanskrit concept where it says you really can't distinguished process and and outcome and we get we have a template for sharing rules in international organizations based on Fair Division and Equity principles political philosophy international relations international law and economics I've done this in uh International Fisheries organizations use these Concepts and certainly this is not the last word but it is a place to start not everybody will agree but it's a template and a basis for if you like systematic discussion based on subjects such as rigorous definitions of fairness rigorous definitions of equity and rigorous definitions of um uh efficiency and efficiency so thank you so much and I'm happy uh to uh handle any questions [Applause] cool so thank you very much we've got many hands up so let's start here okay so the context we're in at the moment ecological collapse climate breakdown where future Generations are starting on the back foot got eight billion globe with sharing 12 Global hectares uh 12 billion Global hectares so we're way over carrying capacity now at the moment we've got people with huge ecological footprints and people with tiny ecological footprints Global North verse Global South you know there's nothing in that when we're splitting the goodies from the seabed that takes into account that we've got some people that are being far more um ecologically damaging than other people so surely we ought to bear that in mind when we're doing the carve up of any new benefits in fact shouldn't we address be addressing the inequality that exists at the moment so yeah that's a good point so we have to some extent um through the equality of outcome and the quality of opportunity distribution weights now uh to a large extent those will be correlated with State parties that have um birth state bad luck and are have maybe better unfortunate circumstances um you can you could try different weights okay we contemplated the human development index all right uh actually is on uh advice as somebody uh here in the economics department at Oxford uh we shied away from that um you you could try different distribution weights remember we gotta we have kind of a narrow technical problem and you're up in front of a international organization that is trying to address a fairly narrow in some ways a very narrow question all right and so you'll have to trying to incorporate these really broader ethical ecological concerns is uh in many ways they're not so interested in that because their their focus is is more like this than you think all right so in our case I guess we would say we tried to uh address that as much as possible through these distribution weights and we tried different uh variables as well we had two population in these distribution weights and I look God I forget all of them I looked at uh density I looked at two or three others uh they didn't really impact stuff too much population drove everything um so yes these are big issues um when you're in these International organizations uh making more focused decisions uh these kind of issues uh don't enter into the discussion as much as you might think where it will enter the discussion but almost only tangentially is our source of minerals is it going to come from terrestrial or deep sea bed Mining and um there's no easy answer to that and both diminishing sorry could we could we just people online can't hear you so she's saying we should look at degrowth and again oh yeah so when you're in these organizations and you're you're tasked with something okay or the organizations themselves their focus is they're actually pretty constrained by international law okay you know they're all the results of treaties that have been negotiated and so that's what they look at and so I would argue that there neither has to come from outside pressure or the U.N General Assembly or something like that but everybody when you're doing these kinds of whether it's Tunas which I work a lot in high seas Fisheries or whether it's deep sea bit minerals where you're working on the Global Commons you're generally working with a treaty-based international organization and that pretty much sets the standard sets precedence its norms and international law for addressing it so yes the big questions out there and you're you're really focused by international law on treaties uh something that's much much more circumscribed and Dale thank you that was a really interesting uh presentation and then raised a few questions my question was actually quite similar to the one we've just had but I was thinking about spatial impacts and spatial inequalities and the sort of bads that might arise from uh deep sea bed mining so if we looked at your your map and quite a concentration of minerals in the Pacific and thinking about whether you think it's possible to account for any harms that might arise from that mining effort regionally to those Nations who are you know present in that area you've been talking about a you know a global um calculation but this is thinking about more spatial impacts so most of now if you're out in the Clarion Clippers in zone there won't be any um the impacts will be upon uh We've looked at Pisces fishery fishing and it's not going to impact it very much okay um mostly the most most high seas fishing is pelagic and which means they're upper surface of the water column and that stuff doesn't infect it too much now if you're into the national Waters or the height or the deep sea bed minings occurring right outside of international waters then you might have a spillover effect what we call an externality all right now then it gets down to who's doing the mining so if it's a mining company or a state's party debts that country whose waters are adjacent to it that's their business all right it's you know their sovereign states now we're not talking ethics or morals here remember I'm working as a in some sense within a treaty-bound institutions okay and I try not to make moral judgments too by the way and I try to rely on ethical principles but instead I try to set based on ethical principles but I try to lay out our outcomes and Logic for States parties to make the decision they're the decision makers now in if you're talking about mining by a company or as you know a state's party uh some are uh independent they're all flagged with a state and either a private company or they might be a public company uh outside the Waters of another country then you're into the um beneficiary pays principle under international law which means that uh it's your problem now it's not necessarily that Stark or a they might negotiate between the two of them but again the constraint of international law says it's your problem if you're downwind of the pollution now it's not as simple as that because people talk and they they'll negotiate but that's what international law more or less says again we're the questions both arise because you're looking at international law and you're looking at treaty-based International organizations you're looking at all these big Global issues and you're saying how come you guys aren't addressing them and when you're actually out dealing with these International organizations they're they're rip is very prescribed it's more prescribed than you think cool okay we're gonna have one more here and then we're gonna go to a couple online and then we're gonna have some more um in the room yeah thanks that was a really great talk um so you talked about how Equity principles apply to individuals and to States um and you might have gotten at this somewhat already but how do private corporations fit into that and what is their standing under the ISA um only legally and accepting a humanitarian law okay put that aside legally only States parties have uh legal pers what they call a legal personality and standing so corporations are represented by their flag state and if it's high seas fishing it's a fishing boat represented by its flag state if it's deep sea bad mining they're represented by their flag state and so then it's whatever that states party does now on the delegation meetings I've been with um I got to say that the private businesses have a lot of say in what goes on all right I've been in lots of lots of Delegation meetings and it's because they're the ones with the focus interest and you'll have to have Focus you have to have people representing all the different interests but the short answer to your question is that a individual Corporation if it's a private Corporation is represented by the state's party of flag State and in some instances it's a government corporation so they're one of the same Okay so we've got which is about formula and the index values in the formulas so the critical role of that parameter new um if powerful states Lobby more powerfully for the choice of index value how fair is that and um yeah following on from here are there any good precedents that indicate that states will do better this time than they have in the past in terms of power oh how fair is it if they Lobby um I don't really know the inner workings of the ISA okay I hear I know them some tangentially but I know more uh tuna rfmos I know those heck a lot better um so the states are going to Lobby they have juristical parity uh they have more than you think I know that much what looking at International organizations um I haven't run them so I can't tell you uh I know lots of people that have but the Lord is true the large states have more influence not always though um I've seen States hold out and for quite a while because they don't like it um some balance between and and the other thing is you know you for a lot of these ocean issues frankly they're not very important in the big scheme of things all right I mean we're talking about the World Trade Organization the World Health Organization geopolitics so there's lots and lots across currents going on here all right that's where the real action is so when we're dealing with ocean resources which you know if they're a big deal to me and you because you're here but in the big scheme of things people are not going to sacrifice their their really big interest for tuna or something okay or deep sea bed mining so there's a limit to I believe and I could be wrong uh there's a limit to how much lobbying there is most of the juristical parity and how much the big states are willing to push their weight around for what what are you know they kind of hold their powder drawing it occurs how much I don't know right and what was the second part to that it was pretty much just how how do you make sure that the big States play better I don't know and by the way the the secretary generals they have almost no power other than if they have uh I've only seen two in my experience Michael and Jim Joseph who used to run Native American tropical tuna commission dad had a lot of influence I've seen so many secretariats um they're scared scared of States they're scared of their own Shadows so uh generally with few exceptions uh the secretariats and the directors they don't do very much it really boils down to the state's parties and one more question from online before we go back um into the room is uh what about deep sea mounts when you talk about uh biodiversity and Fisheries not being much affected how do you make sure the deep sea Maps well what we did is we took our you know a large view of it I I don't know from an individual it would of course if we're doing um the uh uh Cobalt crust then yes then they're gonna they're gonna be impacted but in terms of the Pauline metallic nodules they're down there in an Abyssal plane and like they're like 2 000 meters down below all right something like that so in the sediment plumes are not going to drift over there so the Deep so the sea mounts and in a fishing pelagic fishing doesn't impact them tuna's swordfish stuff like that it would be only some of the deep sea fishing and by the way in most in the deep sea fishing regional fishing management organizations you'd be amazed how much a protected area there is I was shocked first time I saw it's a lot more than you think cool so we've got one okay yeah hello this is not question this is a comment so I'm from Tahiti I'm here visiting Oxford and I'm from the Pacific Ocean so not far from the proposed seabed mining yep so I'd like to say that as an indigenous person of Tahiti I don't know any I am not for CBD mining I don't know anyone that is firstly been mining because we as a small Pacific Islands we admit very small uh carbon emissions and so this clean energy transition is not really benefiting us and also we do not know the environmental impacts so because that future is so unknown that's very dangerous for us and we do not support it thank you oh yeah I just want to make a comment again I don't try to take them uh I'm just speaking personally here I don't try to take a moral stance on any of this stuff uh for a very simple reason that one they need impartial advice okay and uh you want them to make decisions as uh impartially as possible and that requires some partial advice the second thing is in the end these are international organizations that are bound by international law and the oceans is unclose there's a few others and all and then by their own treaties they're all treaty-based organizations and so they're all pretty confined already for a lot of this now you can ask yourself how well does any state represent its own people and I ask myself that about my own country at times you know right so it's not just you all right but that is international law that's how it works and that's not the answer you want to hear but for somebody in my position that's the answer I give uh thanks though really fascinating talk um I guess this kind of actually is not that far it relates somewhat to the previous question you said that 167 parties to the super Authority something like that and excludes well you've said that this United States has excluded for a star but obviously that excludes some other states so presumably there are some relatively serious issues raised by the fact that they're like sorry presumably there are some relatively serious issues raised by the fact that there are lots of states that aren't parties of the Super Bowl uh most of them are I you know there's belizeers I think Venezuela there's I don't know there's a handful that are not States parties now all escaped parties uh to unclose okay um they follow it as custom customary international law okay so the United States for example let's take it it's a big elephant in the room for that and it follows uh uncle's okay and it's a signatory to the United Nations implementing agreement uh which deals with high seas Fisheries uh I believe it's uh the FAA again what's that one port State agreement a couple of others okay uh so it follows it now in terms of Isa um it has it has a representative but it does not have a vote uh the other states I can't speak for them I presume in the end they follow it as customary international law even if it's not formal international law so it's less it's my opinion that it's less of an issue than you might think they follow it it's pretty much because that's the way the world Works customary international law okay and just sorry just briefly um I'm confused about the environmental impacts because you said I thought you said that there were some Extinction risks associated with mining their Abyssal plane so what kind of things are threatened by this kind of mining I can't speak to that um it's very far from my field of knowledge um I know I can give you uh any colleges here might you know I this is standing apology um the you might have some um species that just has a very separate species with a small range ra and then there's undiscovered species that's all I really know I I can't speak to it um you might have the same thing on uh terrestrial mining too all right there are some speed I know where I come from Desert pupfish they're found in the wild in one place okay so if you put a mind that was going to impact desert pupfish you could drive it to Extinction so I would say that that holds for both terrestrial and deep sea bit but I'm not an ecologist so uh standing apology so I've got Katrina and then here and then one at the back oh I think you as well we've been waiting thank you Dale for a wonderful talk Dilly spoke about the distribution of royalties I wonder if there's any flexibility or discussion about what are the royalties and who's got control who who decides what the royalties will be well okay so what happens is there's a couple issues on royalties so the ISA will decide what the sharing rules are and there's discussion um on the actual uh royalty regime okay what the tax is going to be I worked on that for quite a while it's now it's centered at Amit they have a model and now even it's actually not going to be very much it's a lot less you think all right so I don't think it's ever going to be the distribution is ever going to be much of an issue personally okay and it's there's discussion about maybe putting the money into like a sovereign wealth fund all right building that up um and what else and then now remember we're also dealing with international law and treaty-based international organizations so states have juristical parity what they do with the money when it's distributed to them is out of the hands of the ISA okay so that's kind of kind of addresses all your your concerns with royalties I don't think it's going to be an issue because I don't think there's not going to be enough uh royalties to distribute for any kind of foreseeable future and I think whatever happens is probably going to go yeah if I'm making a guess I can't speak from any great knowledge is actually going to go into sustainability fund where you can actually have a greater possibility of impact all right you might build some research stations you might give it to low lion islands are going to be impacted by climate change it's it's whatever the ISA decides this isn't the only solution to the energy transition I mean there's lots of other ways of obtaining the metals you described and yet you describe deep sea bed mining as an inevitability it's going to happen and these are the rules by which it will happen who will eventually make that decision in the interests of the planet as a whole not just this particular resource and the relatively limited number of metals that are provided it's going to be uh again we're dealing with international law so we're dealing with a treaty-based organization so these days parties to the ISA will make the decision now um what I'm saying is that the inevitability occurs with that with a mineral intensive clean energy transition now whether it comes from the deep sea bad minerals is entirely up to the international seabed Authority okay now what it does I can't predict I do know that you have big blocks of Nations that are interested in seeing mining okay and we have a smaller number of nations that are less they're less interested in it and then you are gonna and then even within Nations that are less interested if they're a big industrialized Nation let's just take Germany or take as an example it has a big automobile industry so they're going to need batteries all right and they're gonna so and they're gonna want a secure supply of minerals and they don't produce many of those minerals even the EU even take they're discussing uh is it lithium down in Portugal that out in the middle you know nowhere that's a big battle nobody wants it in their backyard so it's a contentious issue so now if you're the German delegation I'm just taking this example I have no inner knowledge so you've got Volkswagen BMW and Mercedes okay and all the jobs they represent and all those mid-sized companies that are in the supply chains up against the environment Ministry that's what happens in regional fishing management organizations you got into you got boats you got processors up against him for the BB and J treaty up against the environment Ministry so that's the kind of pressures that occur within a country and that's a fact if you like it or not that and I'm not even giving my opinion to what's good or bad I'm not I'm not moralistic at all about any of this stuff so I I can't speak for the ISA I don't know if it's inevitable I know the clean energy transitions here people are are scrambling for it and there's going to be a lot of pressure on the ISA to um approve it but whether it does or not I don't know I suspect so but that's only an individual uh personal guess um so I have two questions uh you have talked about equitable distribution of resources and the common Heritage of mankind uh have you also taken into consideration the Pioneer investor status at the stage of equitable distribution and what about landlocked States uh their roles the second question is uh basically you're talking about minerals driven uh future economy why don't we look at alternate to minerals which are available uh and that technology is now developing so why do we do need to do minerals mining in the deep sea oceans okay I'm you know I didn't understand the second my hearing is not so good anymore but the first you can translate for me in a moment the first one uh Pioneer investment status um you know back when they were negotiating on close that was a big issue right the individual countries that are like what you see China us a few others going to the Moon today trying to stake it up it's exact same things happening and now so there have been Pioneer investors and companies and countries that put a lot of money into the technology none of that seems to be really discussed they're represented by their State's parties and uh we didn't really uh put investment into that um I would argue that from a quality of opportunity standpoint that many countries would uh not not like to see that as a variable all right uh but we didn't include it and it wasn't that issue really hasn't Arisen I didn't understand this so there are a couple of um so one was uh Caso presumably landlocked countries can also be part of the treaty if they want to be yeah I mean if you want to be a if you want to uh ratify the law of the sea you're automatically a member of the ISA your participation I don't know I don't know enough about the individual countries uh I know the tuna afromos which I deal with a lot you know they always send delegations but how much their scientists participate always comes down to budget issues I can't help but think that something like that has to occur with Isa so smaller poorer Nations have a more difficult time participating Beyond a general delegate but in in committees or scientific I would imagine they have a more difficult time I'm going to take chess prerogative because I've got yeah yeah my first question Innovations here is the framework for calculating these kind of Equitable distributions um and I just wonder which other kinds of common Heritage of mankind is or isn't applicable to and you know I can see you know space or climate uh would be something that potentially you could do the same thing for but maybe things that are more land-based where people live like biodiversity would be harder is that is that thinking well the new BB and J treaty that would make great sense now we might do I again it wouldn't be up we would take the same approach but we probably would come up with something very different all right because again we're dealing with Equity or local equity in the small so it's context specific okay but I believe that the real Innovation here by the way is using Equity principles rigorous definition of equity principles as policy instruments you get normative Ethics in there but they're policy instruments you keep demoralizing out and that when you're in front of organizations you got to keep them moralizing out all right or you're automatically you're turned off and we got a rigorous definition of fairness and we have a rigorous definition of efficiency it's not just you know I want this I think this is fair blah blah blah all right now the beauty of doing these things let me go off on a tangent but the incredible and I've seen this in my own eyes in and Isa when you use these Equity principles it creates what we call a focal point okay it's a it's a point for people to concentrate on in essence we've taken the boundaries of the discussion and we bounded it and now we've taken I want this I want I think this is fair I think that's fair we've taken these and now they have to make concrete suggestions they got to argue on logical principles and that are agreed upon so we've bounded the space and we've created a framework for a really rational discussion that's the beauty of this approach and this approach has never been done in an international organization all right that's what's really exciting here and we've pushed the boundaries of international law as as well um so is the thing to hear how you're determining equity and things like that with a particular reference to intergenerational equity and the lack of knowledge and the lack of scientific knowledge about the impacts was there any discussion of precautionary principles or setting money aside for research or potentially mitigation or restitutions for the damages that we don't even realize are being caused presently yes um there is discussion on precautionary principle a great deal of discussion occurs around the environment um there's been less discussion on intergenerational uh distribution or equity it's more a matter of time timing the ISA can only well like I'm just an outsider I can't speak as an Insider all right if Michael was was standing here all right he'd give you a much better answer than me uh and now so again kind of a standing apology but just my impression um yeah you know they got their hands full just trying to get the rules written right now I believe it is not real one of the Pacific Nations actually said we're going to start Mining and there's a two-year trigger by the way the the laws are written in the ISA that they have to come up with regulations so there's they're just trying to get something for right now okay and we haven't even gotten to distribution rules much less intergenerational now there's been uh in the technical report where all this came out there was also discussion there was also a discussion of a seabed sustainability fund the public good which I believe and again it's just a guess um unless there's no nothing official here at all no Insider knowledge that this is the greatest way that the intergenerational equity is going to occur it's not going to occur by deliberately not harvesting now all right it's going to occur with what you do with these funds and I believe that the funds are going to go into this Global public good fund because there's not enough of them to distribute you're going to be much more when people stop to think about it they're going to go well they're a lot more effective in a fund than giving out you know pennies here and pennies there and you don't know where they what they're used for Okay so so there's been very little concern about intergenerational equity and is on it's on the kind of like the next step all right is there there's some thought given to it there's been some commission reports but it's right now the immediacy of just getting this two-year ruling two years time span to get a ruling now is giving pretty focused attention and the environmental regulations are so controversial uh and disputed that all the energy is the bulk of the energy is going there again this is not Insider at all it's just what watching what's going on okay so we have to we have to wrap up now there will be drinks uh next door where you can carry on the discussion with Dale but I'd just like to finish by saying what a privilege it is to have somebody who has such a really strong kind of academic analytical grasp someone who's really at The Cutting Edge of Economics but someone who's also at The Cutting Edge of international policy and is actually standing up in international policy and get able to give us that kind of insights on how things actually work in real life and the combination of that academic rigor and real life um involvement in these treaties is is really unusual and I'm just very honored to have Dale here so thank you very much thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Oxford Martin School

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Keywords: oxfordmartin

Id: jh3kYoM7sJg

Length: 75min 28sec (4528 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023