Deep Sea Mining

Through a process of analyzing background facts, debating, and voting, the participants will need to arrive at a final recommendation: should deep sea mining take place or should there be a moratorium on it?

The question of the moratorium is also based on reality, since organizations such as mining companies or the scientific and environmentalist community have been lobbying for or against it.

The whole workshop ends in a debriefing session, which creates a space to reflect on the events of the simulation and the choices the participants made.

Deep sea mining is a plan to mine the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for a group of metals that include cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese. The supply of these metals from land mining is expected to be insufficient soon, because of an abrupt spike in demand. The spike will come mainly due to the forthcoming energy transition, which will need vast amounts of these metals to build batteries and put them in electric vehicles as well as renewable energy generators, such as solar panels or wind turbines. The minerals are indispensable for the energy transition to mitigate the climate emergency, but extracting them from the seafloor comes with its own environmental risks, many of which are yet to be understood. While scientists have studied climate change for years, the sea bottom remains a mysterious ecosystem. We still know too little about it to understand what environmental repercussions deep-sea mining might bring about.

• Raising awareness of the important challenge of deep sea mining
• An interactive and informative tool to show the different perspectives on deep-sea mining and its repercussions
• Simulation supports an ongoing real-world deliberation and contribute to finding a solution taking into account both people and nature – a solution that does not assume further environmental degradation as a price that we have to pay to avoid climate disasters

Deep Sea Mining Social Simulation Platform

Participants will need a computer with the latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, an internet connection, a webcam and a headset.