The political economy of deep-sea mining: Governance, financial power, and resistance

This project investigates how power, geopolitics, finance and resistance are shaping the emerging governance of deep-sea mining.

Project Summary

This project investigates how power, geopolitics, finance and resistance are shaping the emerging governance of deep-sea mining.

What are we interested in?

Everything in the high-tech, low-carbon economy, from cell phones to data servers to wind turbines, depends on metals and minerals. Copper, cobalt, manganese, and rare earth elements provide the building blocks for consumer electronics, information and communication technologies, and renewable energy systems.

Deep-sea regions contain deposits of these materials, but technological challenges and costs, along with the relative abundance of these materials in easier-to-access terrestrial systems, have limited deep-sea extractive activity.

Technological advances in mining and the designation of a suite of so-called “critical” minerals have reignited interest in seabed mining as a new frontier of production. These advances pose a major threat to poorly understood deep-sea species and ecosystems as corporate actors and supportive states push to open the seabed for extraction.

Goals of the Project

The objective of this project is to understand how non-state actors and corporate finance shape the governance of the deep seabed, and to interrogate the narratives about deep-sea mining that they promote. We aim to use these insights to inform decision-making processes about deep-sea mining to recommend a more sustainable and equitable way forward.