When Solomon Kahoʻohalahala arrived in Jamaica in mid-March to attend a meeting of the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, he felt the weight of the moment on his shoulders.
The United Nations agency is in the midst of crafting regulations to govern a new industry for deep-sea mining that involves scraping mineral deposits from the ocean floor, often referred to as nodules. But after three years of advocating on behalf of Indigenous peoples, none of Kahoʻohalahala’s or his colleagues’ recommendations had been incorporated into the latest draft proposal.
“It was disheartening and discouraging for us to be absolutely dismissed,” said Kahoʻohalahala, who is Native Hawaiian from the island of Lanaʻi in Hawaiʻi. “There was no option for us except to make our best case.”
On the first day of the two-week gathering, Kahoʻohalahala urged the nation-state representatives gathered at the International Seabed Authority headquarters to consider Indigenous peoples’ perspectives. And to his surprise, many representatives agreed with him.
By the time he flew from the Caribbean back to the Pacific the following week, Kahoʻohalahala felt relieved and hopeful. The ISA had agreed to give him and other Indigenous advocates up until 2026 to come up with further recommendations. Moreover, the International Seabed Authority declined a request from the Pacific island country of Nauru in Micronesia to set up a process to evaluate their application to mine the high seas, and reiterated the authority’s previous commitment to finalizing the mining regulations before allowing seabed mining to proceed.
“That was very, very uplifting,” Kahoʻohalahala said.
But no sooner had Kahoʻohalahala departed Jamaica than he heard the news: The Metals Company, a Canadian seabed mining company, announced it was working with the Trump administration to circumvent the international regulatory process and pursue mining in the high seas under a 1980 United States law.
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