The sea has traditionally been looked at as a commons, crisscrossed by trade routes. Control of those routes, the freedom to cross the surface of the sea, was at stake in naval competition. That conflict is being redefined for two interrelated reasons.

The first is that the economic importance of the oceans is rising as new ways are found to exploit their resources. The second is that states are devoting increasing attention to securing their maritime claims, as evident from recent changes in international law and the numerous territorial disputes occurring around the world today. The combination of these two factors is making the sea itself, down to the seafloor, the object in resource conflicts.

Prospects for Ocean Development
Certainly, mankind looking to the sea for sustenance is nothing new. Fishing is one of the oldest of human economic activities, and meets a sixth of the world's demand for animal protein. Pearl and sponge diving have similarly old histories. Marine species are also used as animal feed, fertilizer, clothing, and as additives in cosmetics and medicines like antibiotics. Coral is even used as a building material.

Eco-tourism, including that based on the attraction of coral reefs and other marine environments, is a rapidly expanding business. Desalination plants meet some of the water needs of most of the world's countries. Tidal energy has been exploited as a power source for decades, notably a 240-megawatt station at the mouth of the La Rance river estuary on France's Atlantic coast. The hundred-billion-dollar-a-year offshore oil and gas industry produces a fifth of the world's fossil fuels.

Marine economic activity, however, is likely to expand enormously in the future. Fish protein is likely to become even more important to meeting the world's dietary needs in the twenty-first century. Companies will drill for oil in deeper and deeper waters.

The marine minerals industry has seen some gains in recent years, particularly diamond mining off southern Africa and preparations to mine polymetallic sulfides off New Guinea, and it could see a future boom. The expense of mining the seafloor or drilling for oil, and then moving the product back to the surface, may mean that at least some processing will be done on location, in effect creating an industrial base on the seafloor.

Marine biotechnology could similarly take off, given the potential industrikal benefits of marine microorganisms, particularly hydrothermal vent bacteria. Improvements in desalination could be instrumental in meeting the world's present and future water needs. Power may be generated directly from the oceans, with stations established to take advantage of temperature differentials along oceanic ridges, turbines placed to exploit oceanic streams, and more widespread use made of tidal energy.

The intensified exploitation of the seas and the increased reliance on marine biodiversity makes the task of protecting marine ecosystems even more monumental and crucial. In the end, sea cities may be established to fulfill all of these functions, as well as to provide living space for the world's rising population.

Science Fiction?
While much of this may sound like science fiction, the same was said of offshore oil drilling only a half century ago. Moreover, the pressure to tap into these resources is considerable and growing.

Simply put, there will be more people and those people will individually consume more, resulting in a world economy that could be twice as large in 2020 as it is today. In that time frame more accessible resources on land will be used up, such as oil, fresh water or arable land. Substitutes will likely be found or developed for many natural resources (just as fiberoptics have been replacing old-fashioned copper wiring), and ways will be found to conserve particular resources (like building hybrid-electric vehicles).

Even so, it would be a mistake to assume that there will be substitutes for everything. At the very least, there can be no substitute for water, which some speculate will be the principal cause of twenty-first century resource conflict.

It would also be a mistake to assume that substitutes will always arrive quickly or cheaply enough to prevent serious damage to the world economy. Since the energy crisis of the 1970s, astonishingly little progress has been made in developing alternative energy sources to fossil fuels and nuclear power. Compensating for the vanishing of one resource also requires increasing the use of another resource, which is usually more difficult or costly to access than the one being replaced. Britain only started to mine coal 400 years ago because it was running out of wood for charcoal. To use an example perhaps more pertinent to the present, it has been suggested that conserving oil by building electric cars would increase the use of another resource, cobalt, incidentally a strong candidate for ocean mining.

The Sea as Territory
Those who want to tap these riches of the sea will have to overcome formidable technical problems extracting these riches, and be able to do so in a manner sustainable over the long haul. Even so, with many key resources likely to become rarer and more expensive in the next century, and the technologies needed for extracting them from the oceans more developed, both the means and incentive are likely to come together for interested entrepreneurs.

Perhaps greater are the political questions that these possibilities raise. The law of the sea has historically shaped, and been shaped by, the ability of states to exploit it. The prospect of ocean mining, for instance, was key in determining the form that the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea eventually took. The Convention's provisions on ocean mining were also the principal reason the United States refused to ratify that document, though the Convention went into effect in 1995 over those objections.

The 1982 Convention quadrupled the territorial waters limit from three to 12 miles. It also introduced the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and the rights of archipelagic states into international law. Given the vastness of the oceans even 200 miles may not sound like very much, but many territories claim EEZs far out of proportion to their size. Martinique measures only about 1,000 square kilometers, but has an EEZ of 45,000 square kilometers. Because of this and other overseas departments, France has jurisdiction over 11 million square kilometers, an area 20 times the size of its territory. In all, up to a third of the world's oceans may be included inside EEZs, about 128 million square kilometers of sea in all.

In addition, the marine resources easiest to exploit fall disproportionately within coastal zones. Ninety percent of the world's annual fish catch is caught in coastal zones. They are among the richest storehouses of biodiversity, making them of obvious importance to biotechnology companies, and they are the principal scenes of activity for offshore drilling and the budding ocean mining industries. Because of the intensity of economic activity in these waters, coastal zones are the hardest-hit ecologically by human activity (one reason why fishermen have been moving further into international waters), and will suffer even more disproportionately as that exploitation intensifies further.

In other words, those parts of the oceans that are most economically valuable are those that have been "territorialized." Given historical precedent, there is also reason to think that as the resources of deeper, presently "international" waters become more valuable, these could be subject to territorialization as well. Some argue that this could happen with surprisingly little modification of the Convention: as much as 70 percent of the high seas, the waters outside the EEZs, may also come under national jurisdiction under the provisions of the Convention.

Naval Resource Wars
On land, issues of nationalism, territorial integrity, and the desire to hold strategically important territory are coinciding with resource security in a wave of conflicts around the world. The new economic value of the oceans, and the territorialization of the oceans implicit in recent international law, extends such conflict to the seas. The vagueness of many Convention provisions, and the resulting overlap in many claims, accentuates existing territorial disputes and creates new ones.

Because possession of even very small islands confers jurisdiction over large patches of ocean, disputes over islands has taken on new significance. The possibility that the Hanish Islands may lie in the middle of rich undersea oil and natural gas fields was a factor in the skirmish between Eritrea and Yemen in 1995. The same goes for coastal borders. The desire to control offshore oilfields may have been a factor when Egypt and Sudan skirmished in 1995 over the Halayeb Triangle, and when the Nigerian army battled Cameroonian police for the Bakassi peninsula the year after that.

While most incidents have fortunately not led to open war, some of these clashes could have far deadlier consequences. In June 1999, North and South Korea fought their bloodiest naval battle since the end of the Korean War over crab-fishing grounds in the Sea of Japan, resulting in the sinking of a North Korean torpedo boat and damaging several vessels on both sides. Further fighting this year produced similar results.

Potentially even more dangerous is the conflict surrounding the South China Sea, a scene of regular military incidents between economically dynamic, resource-hungry states since the 1970s. China, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia all claim islands in the South China Sea and their surrounding waters. The location of the islands astride important sea lanes aside, they are believed to sit on top of large reserves of oil and gas, and are also rich fishing grounds. Because of their conflicting claims many of these countries have in the 1990s engaged in large-scale arms buildups, emphasizing naval systems ranging from missile boats to submarines and aircraft carriers.

Additionally, while conflicts between states over offshore resources receive the most publicity, they are also factors in today's more numerous and often bloodier internal conflicts, the Indonesian archipelago being a hotbed for such conflicts. Indonesia's unconventional struggle for East Timor, which claimed some 200,000 lives, was partly a struggle for control of the region's rich offshore oil reserves. The same goes for the 25-year-old conflict in the state of Aceh.

The number of such flash points is likely to grow longer in the future as patches of seawater and points on the seafloor of economic value multiply in number, as marine resources gain in economic importance and as particular supplies become depleted, driving prices up and making other resource stocks more valuable.

Moreover, the ecological disruption of a country's maritime claim may also be a factor in stimulating conflict between countries, something reflected in the growing recognition of environmental protection within EEZs in Navy white papers. For instance, economic damage to one country from the spillover of another country's pollution into its maritime claim could provide the spark for open war, such as when one state's ocean mining operation produces pollution that damages another state's fish stocks.

Hope for the Future
Nevertheless, there are some grounds for optimism in that the heightened sense of territoriality may push toward greater responsibility toward the oceans. While the environmental record of most of the world's governments leaves a lot to be desired, at least their problems will no longer be dismissed as the "tragedy of the commons."

There is also the hope that improved conservation and alternative energy technologies will reduce the hunger for the sea's resources, and so reduce the frequency of conflict and war over them.

Consequently, while the development and territorialization of the seas may bring with it opportunities, it also carries risks and dangers which, while not insurmountable, must nonetheless be attended to. UW