Deep-sea mining: world’s oceans facing a ‘new industrial frontier’

Governments and companies are lining up to begin mining for metals and minerals in the world’s oceans, endangering some of Earth’s most important ecosystems, according to a new Greenpeace report.

Environmentalists warns that the fledgling deep-sea mining industry not only risks destroying vast regions of the ocean floor, but could also make the climate emergency worse.

So what’s happening?

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A Greenpeace investigation found that the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a United Nations body, has issued a total of 29 exploration licences to countries including the UK, China, France, Belgium, India, Germany and Russia, which are sponsoring corporate contractors.

The licences apply to areas of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans and cover a total 500,000 square miles - “five times bigger than the UK”, reports The Guardian.

The British government holds licences to exploit more of the international seabed than any state apart from China.

Mining can begin after regulations are agreed, with the ISA expecting to have concluded negotiations by July 2020.

Once those regulations are in place, large machines will be lowered to the seabed to excavate rare metals, such as cobalt.

The deep-sea mining industry says that extracting these metals is essential to efforts to transition to a green economy, providing the raw materials for key technologies including batteries, computers and phones in a less harmful manner than most existing mining operations.

What does Greenpeace say?

Greenpeace has warned that the mining can cause “severe and potentially irreversible” environmental harm, reports the Financial Times.

“The health of our oceans is closely linked to our own survival. Unless we act now to protect them, deep-sea mining could have devastating consequences for marine life and humankind,” Louisa Casson, an ocean campaigner at Greenpeace, told The Guardian.

The organisation is calling for “tighter environmental safeguards”, such as international agreement on a UN treaty to put conservation at the heart of ocean governance, reports Mining Weekly.

Environmentalists warn that the proposed mining would threaten not only crucial ecosystems, but also the global fight to prevent climate warming.

As well as destroying little-understood regions of the ocean floor, the operations threaten to disrupt and release carbon stored in deep sea sediments.

In an article for The Guardian, environmentalist Chris Packham writes: “We’ve already seen the huge destruction ravaged upon our planet by corporations mining on land. Are we really prepared to give the go-ahead to the mining industry expanding into a new frontier, where it will be even harder for us to scrutinise the damage caused?”

What has the UK government said?

The Government has awarded deep-sea exploration licences to a subsidiary of weapons giant Lockheed Martin.

“The UK continues to press for the highest international environmental standards, including on deep sea mineral extraction,” a government spokesperson said. “We have sponsored two exploration licences, which allows scientific marine research to fully understand the effects of deep sea mining and we will not issue a single exploitation licence without a full assessment of the environmental impact.”

In 2013, then-PM David Cameron promised that deep-sea mining would generate £40bn for the UK over the next 30 years.

Greenpeace says it is unclear how this figure was reached, and points out that in 2017 the National Subsea Research Initiative, a research body, warned government advisors of the potential environmental damage to the seabed.