June 18, 2020 — For humanity to kick its fossil fuel habit, we’re going to need a lot more wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. Building all of that green energy infrastructure will likely require billions of tons of metals and minerals, raising the question of where we’re going to get them. One surprising possible answer? The bottom of the sea, where key green energy metals, including nickel, cobalt, and rare earth minerals, can be found in abundance.
But as companies inch closer to actually mining the ocean’s depths, a growing chorus of scientists and environmental advocates are pushing back, warning that such activity could cause irreversible harm to ecosystems we’ve barely begun to understand. Last month, the NGO MiningWatch Canada, along with the Ocean Foundation’s Deep Sea Mining Campaign, published a report calling for a moratorium on regulations that would permit companies to begin mining the Pacific seafloor until the risks are better understood and until all alternatives have been “fully explored and applied.” The International Seabed Authority — a U.N. body with a mandate to oversee resource extraction on the ocean floor — is scheduled to issue draft regulations later this year.
Mining regulations on land “are tailored to our understanding of how the ecosystem works,” said MiningWatch Canada’s Catherine Coumans, who served on the editorial team for the report, which summarizes the findings of more than 250 peer-reviewed studies. In the deep ocean, Coumans said, “we’re creating regulations for an ecosystem that we don’t understand.”