“It feels like a real crunch point,” Louisa Casson of Greenpeace International told AFP. “We are seeing surging momentum for a moratorium (on deep-sea mining). But at the same time, the industry is saying 2025 is the year when we’re just going to start applying to mine.”
Greenpeace has warned for years of the risks posed by deep-sea mining to the oceans’ unique, but only partly understood, ecosystems. Until recently, the idea of plunging deep into ocean abyss for the large-scale extraction of coveted minerals like cobalt, nickel and copper seemed a distant possibility.
The world paid little attention when the International Seabed Authority (ISA), created under UN aegis in 1994, quietly began negotiating a “mining code” — rules for the future extraction of seabed resources in international waters. But the calendar has taken on urgency.
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