The Pacific at a crossroads
When US forces intervened in Venezuela to secure strategic oil resources, it exposed a hard truth: resource wealth can destabilise nations and invite external control.
As the Pacific faces growing interest in deep-sea minerals, we must ask: Will our ocean become the next contested frontier?
As demand for “critical minerals” accelerates, deep-sea mining (DSM) has shifted from speculative idea to pressing possibility. Yet DSM is no ordinary industry.
It requires immense financial and technological capacity — assets concentrated in wealthy states and transnational corporations — risking a familiar pattern: Extractive promises for outsiders, long-term costs for Pacific peoples.
Strategic minerals, real geopolitics
DSM is often framed as necessary for green technologies, but the geopolitics are impossible to ignore.
Great power rivalry now stretches across our ocean, with seabed minerals positioned as strategic assets for economic and military supply chains.
When powerful actors treat the seabed as an extension of their security interests, Pacific sovereignty becomes precarious. The lesson from other resource frontiers is clear: Without strong, Pacific–led governance, promises of development can quickly turn into vulnerability, making our ocean a contested arena rather than a shared commons.
Whose knowledge counts?
Behind the technical debates lies a deeper question of justice: Who gets to define the ocean’s future?
Too often, technocratic narratives drown out Indigenous understandings of the sea as kin, ancestor, and life–source. Pacific epistemologies — relational, custodial, and intergenerational — are not cultural footnotes; they are governance principles.
If DSM proceeds, it must proceed on terms that protect ecological integrity and cultural continuity, not just investor timelines.
“Consultation” cannot be a checkbox. Communities must hold real power over decisions that will reverberate long after corporate timelines end.
Environmental security, Pacific eyes
Proponents argue DSM will power the renewable transition. Critics warn of irreversible damage to fragile ecosystems and sediment plumes that cross borders and undermine fisheries and food security.
For the Pacific, environmental security is not an abstract calculation, it is daily reality.
The Boe Declaration widened our security lens to human and environmental dimensions; the Pacific “Ocean of Peace” vision points away from militarised competition and toward stewardship.
Our policy compass should align with these homegrown frameworks: protect life, uphold dignity, and prioritise custodianship over short–term extraction.
Fiji’s choice and the region’s
Fiji has called for a moratorium on DSM, echoing other Pacific leaders. That stance reflects our responsibility to future generations. But rhetoric must be matched by law.
Outdated mining statutes and permissive seabed regulations create a dangerous gap: progressive statements without enforceable safeguards risk becoming blue–economy greenwash.
The region presents a mixed picture, some states rush toward exploration while others pause for science and ethics.
Divergence is understandable; fragmentation is risky. Our ocean connects us. So will the impacts.
Multilateral rules, Pacific agency
DSM in areas beyond national jurisdiction falls under the International Seabed Authority; biodiversity in the water column is covered by the new High Seas (BBNJ) treaty. Add vast EEZs and coastal rights, and governance quickly becomes complex.
Complexity should not mean passivity. Pacific states have shaped global ocean rules before; we can do so again by insisting on precaution, robust environmental standards, fair benefit–sharing, and meaningful Indigenous participation.
We should also guard against unilateral power plays that bypass multilateral processes and sideline Pacific voices.
A practical path forward
If DSM is to be considered at all, three steps are essential:
Legislate precaution at home: Update national laws to make moratoria meaningful, require independent science, and mandate community consent that is free, prior, and informed.
Set regional red lines: As a Forum family, agree that no DSM proceeds without proven ecological safety, transparent monitoring, and cross–border harm safeguards—especially for tuna and coastal livelihoods.
Amplify Pacific epistemologies: Embed custodianship, relational ethics, and intergenerational justice into regional positions at the ISA and other global forums—not as rhetoric, but as binding standards.
Call to action
The Pacific cannot afford to let seabed minerals become the next catalyst for external interference and internal fragmentation. Our leaders have already articulated a vision of a just, secure, and sustainable Blue Pacific.
Now is the time to make that vision operational—through law, regional solidarity, and Indigenous leadership.
We must define our ocean future on Pacific terms: guardianship over extraction, relationships over rivalries, and the well–being of our people over short cycles of profit.
-VILIAME KASANAWAQA is a Doctoral Researcher, Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury
-AMELIA RARATABU is a free-lance sustainable development and policy specialist based in Suva
-SAIRUSI BOSENAQALI, is the community development specialist of Beyond the Bilibili a Fiji based NGO. The views expressed herein are the authors’.
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