Marine Ecosystem Bodies as Entangled Environments and Entangled Laws: Drones and the Marine Environment

The adoption of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the steady development of international environmental law in the twentieth century shaped the marine environment as an object of legal protection. However, the exponential growth of substantive obligations to protect the marine environment, conserve marine biodiversity, and prevent marine pollution, has been largely ineffective due to lack of enforcement. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed for marine environmental protection are seen, in scholarship and policy, as a means to close the enforcement gap, thereby revolutionizing the field by significantly increasing states’ maritime awareness. In contrast, our tentative analysis shows that while UAVs can translate complex environmental concerns into data readily available for analysis and action, such datafication of marine environments comes with high risks. More specifically, datafication enables multiple uses of gathered data, including for surveillance, military, and commercial purposes. These concerns tend to fall outside current debates on the international regulation of the use of UAVs in marine environments. In our essay, we explore whether international law recognizes the possibilities and risks involved in deploying UAVs into the marine environment. We draw on doctrinal and posthuman feminist legal approaches to analyze how UAVs interact with the wider context of “marine ecosystem bodies” in terms of international law, as well as how those terms may need to be reconfigured to accommodate the complexity of the many actors, agents, and materials of marine ecosystems.