Biodiversity Loss from Deep-Sea Mining Will Be Unavoidable

An international team of 15 marine scientists, resource economists and legal scholars, including Nicholas Institute senior scholar Linwood Pendleton, argued in a letter published in the journal Nature Geoscience ($) that deep-sea mining will come at a cost to biodiversity. “The extraction of non-renewable resources always includes tradeoffs,” Pendleton said. “A serious trade-off for deep-sea mining will be an unavoidable loss of biodiversity, including many species that have yet to be discovered.” Given this inevitable outcome, it’s critical to understand deep-sea ecosystems and what we stand to lose before mining begins, he said.

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