“And it’s also the first time, more importantly, that seafood industry players, including some pretty major ones, have come out with a statement about needing a moratorium.” “This is the first time there’s ever been climate modeling of tuna stocks in relation to deep-sea mining,” said Diva Amon, the lead author of the study and a marine biologist with the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This region, between Hawaii and Mexico, is rich with polymetallic nodules that are embedded with minerals, including nickel, cobalt and copper, and has been targeted by deep-sea mining companies seeking licenses to exploit the resource. The appeal coincides with research, published Tuesday in the journal Nature npj Ocean Sustainability, finding that tuna-one of the world’s most valuable fisheries, worth $40 billion a year-will migrate away from increasingly acidic and oxygen-starved waters into an area of the Pacific called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Most of the waters proposed for such development lie beyond national jurisdictions and have become the latest frontiers and flashpoints in the global rush to source rare metals for electric batteries and other technologies that are important for the climate-critical transition away from fossil fuels. The groups said Tuesday that they will send an appeal to the United Nations-backed International Seabed Authority (ISA), asking it to proceed with extra caution in developing regulations and complete them before granting any licenses to mine seabeds thousands of feet under the ocean’s surface. Major seafood industry and marine conservancy groups are calling for a “precautionary pause” in the global race to mine deep-sea minerals, pointing to new research that suggests excavating the ocean seabed could cause tuna populations to plummet.
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