June 26, 2017

Biodiversity Loss from Deep-Sea Mining Will Be Unavoidable

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

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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