By Dr George Chaponda
The writer is the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Malawi.
LILONGWE, Malawi | 1 July 2026 (IDN) — When Malawi became the first landlocked country to ratify the BBNJ Agreement, we affirmed a simple but powerful principle: stewardship of the global commons is a shared responsibility, not a matter of geography. Today, that same principle guides our position on one of the most consequential emerging issues in ocean governance – deep-sea mining.
In 2023, Cyclone Freddy tore through Malawi for weeks, an almost unheard-of duration, displacing thousands of people. Malawi has no coastline. And yet the ocean had come for us anyway.
Even in a landlocked country like Malawi, the ocean remains central to livelihoods, food security, and economic stability. Ocean-driven climate systems, particularly the Indian Ocean Dipole and El Niño–Southern Oscillation, shape Malawi’s rainfall patterns and the timing of its growing seasons. These rainfall dynamics are critical for maise production, the country’s primary staple crop, and for tobacco cultivation, which generates over 50 per cent of Malawi’s annual export earnings. Variability in ocean temperatures can therefore translate directly into droughts or floods, affecting maise yields, destabilising food security, and undermining tobacco exports, the economic backbone of the country. What happens in the ocean does not stay there; it is felt in Malawi’s fields, markets, foreign exchange reserves, and rural incomes.
Pause on Deep-sea Mining
This is why Malawi supports a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining.
The deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction—known in law as “the Area”—is designated under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as the common heritage of humankind. This principle places a collective obligation on all states to ensure that the Area’s resources are managed responsibly and for the benefit of present and future generations and to think beyond short-term extraction.
At present, the scientific community has not reached consensus on the full extent of environmental impacts of deep-sea mining. Early evidence points to potentially irreversible damage to fragile ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, and disruption of critical ocean functions, including carbon sequestration. Disturbing these systems risks undermining the ocean’s capacity to regulate the climate – a risk the world can ill afford.
For countries like Malawi, which are already experiencing the devastating effects of climate change, this is not an abstract concern. Tropical Cyclone Freddy, now recognised as the longest‑lasting tropical cyclone on record, persisted at tropical storm strength for over five weeks as it crossed the Indian Ocean before making landfall in southern Africa. When it struck Malawi in March 2023, it brought days of intense rainfall that triggered severe floods and mudslides, destroying homes, washing away roads and bridges, and damaging schools, clinics and power infrastructure in the south of the country.
Displacement
More than 659,000 people were displaced, and over 200,000 hectares of cropland were washed away or submerged just before the main harvest, leaving families without shelter, stored food, or income. Displacement here meant households crowded into public buildings and makeshift shelters, facing heightened risks of disease, food insecurity and disrupted education even as they worked to rebuild their lives. For a landlocked but river‑ and lake‑dependent country like Malawi, Freddy is a stark reminder of how closely our futures are tied to the stability of the ocean–atmosphere system—and why any activity that could further destabilise ocean and climate systems must be approached with the utmost caution and guided by clear precautionary principles rather than short‑term gain.
A precautionary pause does not mean rejecting development or innovation. Rather, it reflects a commitment to responsible governance. It would help safeguard deep-sea ecosystems and their role in long-term carbon storage while allowing time for targeted scientific research, including in situ observations and research cruises, to improve understanding of deep-ocean biodiversity, ecological processes, and ecosystem resilience.
Resource extraction
The history of resource extraction across the globe is not encouraging. If any benefits are derived from the common heritage of humankind, they must be shared fairly, particularly with developing countries that have historically been excluded from the exploitation of global resources. Without adequate safeguards, there is a real risk that deep-sea mining could exacerbate existing inequalities, concentrating any benefits in the hands of a few while distributing environmental costs globally.
Multilateralism provides the pathway to avoid such outcomes. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), established under UNCLOS, plays a critical role in ensuring that activities on the deep seabed are conducted for the benefit of all. Its mandate is not limited to enabling extraction: Article 145 of UNCLOS—reaffirmed by the 1994 Agreement on Implementation of Part XI—imposes on the Authority a duty to take the measures necessary to ensure effective protection of the marine environment from the harmful effects of activities in the Area, and the Seabed Disputes Chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has confirmed that this duty requires applying the precautionary approach. Where the science needed to prevent serious harm remains incomplete, a precautionary pause is not a departure from the ISA’s mandate – it is a faithful exercise of it.
Why land-locked Malawi ratified a vital agreement
When Malawi became the first landlocked nation to ratify the BBNJ Agreement, some found it curious. What stake does a country without a coast have in a treaty about the high seas? The answer is the same one that brings us to this debate. The ocean does not stop at our borders; its consequences don’t either. The BBNJ Agreement itself anchors this position: Article 7 enshrines both the precautionary principle and the special interests of landlocked developing countries among its guiding principles, and Article 5(2) requires that the Agreement be applied in a manner that promotes coherence and coordination across ocean governance frameworks. A precautionary pause on deep-sea mining is not a disruption to that system. It is what the system was designed to do.
In supporting a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining, Malawi stands with those who believe that the ocean is not a frontier to be exploited at any cost but a shared inheritance to be protected with care. When Cyclone Freddy’s winds finally died down and the floodwaters receded, what remained was not an abstraction about ocean systems. It was flattened homes, ruined harvests, and families with nowhere to go. We have no coastline. But we know exactly the force of the ocean. That is reason enough to protect it. [IDN-InDepthNews]