A destruição do fundo dos mares por meia dúzia de companhias sem controlo

Vivemos num planeta de loucos irresponsáveis.

Secretive ‘gold rush’ for deep-sea mining dominated by handful of firms

Greenpeace report warns against granting licences to ‘deeply destructive’ industry with opaque oversight, and calls for global ocean treaty.

The new Greenpeace report, released on Wednesday, suggests this would be premature, because the industry is secretive and inadequately regulated. Among its findings are:

• Deep sea mining is deeply destructive. Excavation of mineral nodes, for example, is done by giant tractors that chew through the sea bed

• The oversight organisation, ISA, has no environmental or scientific assessment group. Instead, applications are vetted by a legal and technical commission, which is dominated by lawyers and geologists. Only three of the 30 members of the commission are biologists or environmental specialists

• ISA has not rejected any of the 30 exploration applications it has received. It has potential conflict of interest because it receives $500,000 (£374,000) for each licence

• Seabed resources are supposed to benefit all of humanity and promote sustainable development, but just three companies from wealthy nationshave a hand in eight of the nine contracts to explore for minerals in the Pacific Clarion-Clipperton zone that have been awarded since 2010: Canadian-registered DeepGreen, Belgian corporate Dredging Environmental and Marine Engineering NV (Deme), and a UK-based subsidiary of the US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin

• The role of these companies is opaque. None of these parent companies are listed by the ISA in its list of contractors. Many operate through subsidiaries or by taking shares in partners in small island states, often in conjunction with national governments. This leads to concerns about accountability in the event of an accident – the subsidiaries are often small, which could leave poor nations with huge liabilities

• Corporate influence on some governments is so great at ISA that DeepGreen executives temporarily stood in for Nauru delegates in a February 2019 session of the ISA council, where Deme executives also spoke on behalf of Belgium

• Ties between the UK government and the industry have also been unhealthily cosy. Cabinet-office officials have worked for Lockheed Martin after retirement. Former prime minister David Cameron used Lockheed Martin estimates of the potential value of the deep-sea mining industry, rather than independent analysis.

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