Petition for moratorium on seabed mining launches

Petition for moratorium on seabed mining launches with 3500 signatures

On World Oceans Day, Kiwis Against Seabed mining today launched a petition calling for a time out on seabed mining in New Zealand’s marine environment.

Already, nearly 3500 people have signed the petition to Environment Minister Nick Smith, calling for a Time Out on seabed mining. The signatures were collected by Lush Cosmetics over a six week period, and KASM is now widening the campaign.

“After two failed seabed mining proposals, it has become abundantly clear that we don’t know enough about the impacts of this experimental practice, and we need more information,” said Phil McCabe, chairperson of Kiwis Against Seabed Mining.

“The mining industry is now calling for our Government to weaken the laws that govern our oceans to make it easier for them to mine the seabed - that’s totally unacceptable,” he said.

“World Oceans Day is a good day to call taihoa on seabed mining. We need to know what we’re dealing with and where we want to go before diving headlong into this unchartered territory,” said McCabe.

Trans Tasman Resources bid to mine ironsands from the seabed off the South Taranaki Bight brought a record number of submissions to the EPA for any application in its history with 99% of submission in opposition.

Both this proposal - and the one by Chatham Rock Phosphate to mine the deep seabed on the Chatham Rise for phosphate – were refused by the EPA, which cited high levels of uncertainty around environmental impacts and only “modest at best” economic benefits to New Zealand. The TTR decision stated that overall the application was premature.

New Zealand has the fourth largest Marine Estate in the world, twenty times our land area and arguably our greatest asset, yet it is poorly understood and there is currently no overarching management plan.

Instead of inviting more wastage of investment dollars on further haphazard and inappropriate seabed mining applications, KASM thinks it’s time for the Government to go back to the drawing board, do more research into the makeup of our marine environment and initiate a national discussion on how we want to treat our oceans.

“We’re only just discovering the blue whale foraging ground in the Taranaki Bight – what else is out there that could be affected? We just don’t have that information.”

ENDS

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