Land and deep-sea mining: the challenges of comparing biodiversity impacts

Abstract

The term ‘biodiversity,’ while casually used in practice, is a complicated subject to measure, interpret, contextualize, and compare. Yet the possible advent of deep-sea mining in the mid-2020’s compels us to compare potential impacts of biodiversity loss across ecologically distant realms, a formidable task. Supplying the world’s green infrastructure is expected to lead to shortages of nickel, cobalt and other metals; meanwhile polymetallic nodules sitting atop the abyssal plains of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean contain billions of tons of nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, enough to solve the supply issues. Implicit in society’s decision of whether to exploit this resource is a tradeoff of harm to biodiversity in the CCZ’s abyssal seafloor and its overlying water column, versus intensification of harm to rainforests and other terrestrial mining habitats. Here we frame the challenges of comparing biodiversity impacts across such different realms, spanning the gamut from normative to fundamental: ambiguities in definitions, lack of protocol standardization, physical challenges in measurement, difficulties to integrate measures among different taxonomic groups, profound differences between ecologically distant realms, contextual necessity to attribute value to mathematical index results, and constraints of current knowledge about species, ecosystems and system level impacts of biodiversity change. Quantitative biodiversity measures alone cannot rank one system above the other; measures must be supplemented with qualitative judgements of the tangible and intangible values of species and habitats to natural systems and to humans, along with consideration of other threats that they and we face.