International Submarine Cables and Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction

Abstract

If one uses Facebook, Facetime, Skype, Netflix, or any application of the internet internationally, a submarine cable is involved. Fibre optic cables bind the world together from governments, banks, shipping, airlines and other major logistic industries to homes and personal electronic devices. Server farms maintained by major telecom and content companies allow vast amounts of data to be stored and retrieved from thecloud. Not often appreciated is the fact that these server locations worldwide are connected by submarine fibre optic cables. In this sense, thecloudis beneath the sea. While submarine communication cables have been in steady use since 1850, their preeminent place in the modern world has never been as dominant and personal as now. Since 1884, this critical international infrastructure has rested upon international treaties, now reflected in universally accepted provisions of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (unclos) that provides for freedoms to lay and maintain international submarine cables. Recently, calls have mounted in the context of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (bbnj) for centralized control of submarine cables and for express orde factodiminishment of the freedoms related to them that have served the world’s peoples for so long. This monograph examines the time proven importance of the existing international treaties, the largely peer review science on the environmental interaction of submarine cables with high seas environments, and the current submarine cable issues in the context of thebbnjdebates.

A risk assessment for the remote ocean: the case of the South East Atlantic

“…Submarine communication cables are the most common form of submarine infrastructure in ABNJ, with approximately 314,350km predicted to have been laid up to 2018 (Burnett and Carter, 2018). Impacts to benthic environments (and therefore natural capital assets) are managed via careful routing that minimizes any need for armouring or burial, and the use of inert marine grade sheaths.…”

Advances in Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensing for Monitoring Marine Infrastructure, Measuring the Deep Ocean, and Quantifying the Risks Posed by Seafloor Hazards

“…Due to their fast speed (up to 20 m/s) and potential to travel over vast areas of seafloor (up to thousands of kilometers), processes such as landslides and turbidity currents can be particularly damaging for valuable seafloor infrastructure such as cables and pipelines (Pope et al, 2017). While few direct measurements have been made of these processes (Azpiroz-Zabala et al, 2017;Talling et al, 2015), much of what we know about the velocity and run-out distance of these hazards comes from the documented timing and location of sequential telecommunications cable breaks (Burnett & Carter, 2017;Carter et al, 2014). As the global network of telecommunications cables transmits more than 99% of all digital data traffic worldwide (including the Internet), better understanding the threat posed by such processes is of global importance (Kelley et al, 2014).…”