Session Description
Deep-sea mining (DSM) is emerging as a new global extractive frontier, driven by rising demand for critical minerals, yet the approach to environmental impact assessment (EIA) remains largely undefined and untested. This session invites novel or non-traditional methodologies and frameworks that could sharpen our understanding of abyssal ecosystem response to disturbance and address the scale of baseline uncertainty.
Building on previous IAIA session, "Mining Across Land and Sea: Assessing and Communicating Social Impacts," on the social dimensions of terrestrial and DSM, this session turns to the environmental side of the ledger. Because sampling challenges in the deep sea often yield less spatially and temporally refined data than assessments of shallower ecosystems, how can practitioners draw on non-standard or novel technologies and approaches, including methods established in other fields but not yet routinely applied to deep-sea assessment, to build EIAs that more robustly capture environmental response to DSM?
In keeping with the conference's theme of looking back to inform the future of impact assessment, this session also asks what tools and lessons from decades of practice in other sectors have been underused or overlooked in deep-sea assessment, and how they might be adapted to close knowledge gaps and improve spatial and temporal understanding of baseline variability, cumulative effects, and threshold-setting.
We welcome contributions from academia, industry, regulators, and technical specialists working at the intersection of oceanography, engineering, and impact assessment, with the goal of expanding the toolkit available for EIA in the deep ocean.
Session Summary
This session reviews non-standard and novel approaches to assessing the environmental impact of deep-sea polymetallic nodule mining. It presents technological developments and/or application of approaches utilized in other areas but not yet adopted in deep-sea assessments.
Session Chair
Kersey Sturdivant
Wetstone
United States
Session Co-chair
Simon Freeman
Wetstone
United States