The Arctic Ocean’s deep sea ecosystems will be safe from deep sea mining – at least for the next two years. Norway had plans in the works to begin seabed mining exploration in its national waters as soon as next year. This could have meant destruction on a massive scale for ancient seabed ecosystems, but those plans are now postponed for at least nine months.
A minority party in the Norwegian parliament successfully halted the Ministry of Energy’s plan to begin issuing mining permits in early 2025 following an outcry from scientists, fisherman and environmental organizations. Although the permitting process is on pause until after the country’s next election, some of the preparations needed to issue mining licenses will continue.
French newspaper Le Monde reported that Norway was considering moving forward with seabed mining in its national waters to avoid depending on China for the critical minerals needed to produce batteries, renewable energy and other electronics.
It’s fairly straightforward to understand that seabed mining, were it to ever operate at scale, would be a disaster for ocean life on the sea floor, much of which has taken millennia to grow and evolve. Machines scouring hundreds of square miles of seafloor will decimate the animals that grow there, while the noise, light and plumes created by the mining operation could disturb ocean life all the way from the surface to the seafloor. This destruction is too steep a price to pay for any reason.
This price is even more absurd because it comes at a time when countries the world over are throwing out tons of the very same minerals that mining would extract every day in the form of e-waste – and this waste is growing faster than our capacity to recycle it.
As we highlighted in our We don’t need deep sea mining report in June, putting ocean ecosystems at risk by starting seabed mining at the same time as we’re flooding landfills with broken or obsolete electronics is a choice we don’t need to make.
While our report focused on the e-waste and recycling figures for the U.S., Norway also produces a lot of e-waste: according to the U.N. E-Waste Monitor, Norway had the highest e-waste generation per capita in Europe in 2022. Norway does have some of the strongest policies in place to collect and recycle the materials in this e-waste in the world. Still, there are gaps in the system that could allow some of these valuable materials to get lost. And there is certainly a lot more e-waste in Europe and around the world getting sent to landfills every day – shouldn’t countries like Norway look to this vast, untapped and polluting resource for critical minerals first, before it considers damaging its seafloor ecosystems?
Instead of disrupting some of the most ancient, wild places on the planet, we should do everything we can to keep our critical minerals from becoming waste – design our products to last, repair them when they break, reuse them where we can and recycle them when we absolutely can’t do anything else.
I hope that this common sense approach will prevail and that countries such as Norway won’t start seabed mining, and that the ancient and still-unknown ecosystems in the depths of the Arctic Ocean can continue to thrive for millennia to come.
