Marine scientists have warned that deep-sea mining would result in catastrophic ecological disaster. Can a plan to mine the seabed for metals, slated to start in a few years, still be stopped?
It’s rare that a tiny country like Nauru gets to determine the course of world events. But, for tangled reasons, this rare event is playing out right now. If Nauru has its way, enormous bulldozers could descend on the largest, still mostly untouched ecosystem in the world—the seafloor—sometime within the next few years. Hundreds of marine scientists have signed a statement warning that this would be an ecological disaster resulting in damage “irreversible on multi-generational timescales.
Large swaths of the seabed are covered with potentially mineable—and potentially extremely valuable—metals, in the form of blackened lumps called polymetallic nodules. For decades, companies have been trying to figure out how to mine these nodules; so far, though, they’ve been able to do only exploratory work. Permits for actual mining can’t be granted until the I.S.A. comes up with a set of regulations governing the process, a task it’s been working on for more than twenty years.
Both Nauru and the Metals Company have portrayed the effort to mine the seabed as essential to cutting carbon emissions. Clean-energy technologies such as electric-car batteries, at least in their current form, require metals, including cobalt, that are found in the nodules in relatively high concentrations. “Nauru is part of a pioneering venture that could soon power the world’s green economy,” a video produced by the country’s government declares.
Critics maintain that the very structure of the I.S.A. biases it toward mining. To finance itself, the body depends on fees from companies doing exploratory work and on contributions from member states. Many member states seem to have stopped paying; a report from 2020 listed almost sixty countries that owe at least two years’ contributions. The I.S.A. is expected to receive a percentage of the profits from seabed mining if it moves forward.
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