Deep-sea mining is the new gold rush

Brut America

As land ressources are running dry, many countries and multinationals are racing to mine the seafloor.   Brut Nature met environmental activist Claire Nouvian. She tells us what this new gold rush entails.

Transcript

00:00What is the role of the United Nations in the fight against climate change?

00:15All the nations that have a coastline have asked for the extension of their exclusive economic zone,

00:22which covered 200,000 nautical miles,

00:24they asked for the extension to 350,000 nautical miles,

00:27in order to be able to forage and exploit all these resources.

00:54What is the role of the United Nations in the fight against climate change?

01:17All these minerals are extracted in large part in countries that are a little hard to access from a geopolitical point of view.

01:23For example, Central Africa or China.

01:28So there is an interest of the industrialists to go deep into the oceans

01:32to recover their autonomy from a point of view of food as a resource for their industries.

01:38What is the role of the United Nations in the fight against climate change?

01:53What is the role of the United Nations in the fight against climate change?

02:18The absolute challenge is not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

02:23The challenge is that we have done this, we have cut the top of the mountains,

02:27we have scraped the earth, we have exploited everything that was exploitable on earth.

02:32We are not going to start the same cycles again in the great depths.

02:35What is the role of the United Nations in the fight against climate change?

02:49It is well known today that only 10% of mobile phones in Europe are recycled.

02:55This means that instead of doing mining at the bottom of the oceans,

02:59mining should be done in cities.

03:02We should go and get everyone's phones to recycle them.

03:05This is where there is a wealth of all these precious minerals.

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