The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative published a new briefing paper addressing the potential devastating environmental impacts and significant risks of financing or supporting deep-sea mining activities. Designed for banks, insurers and investors, the paper highlights that the financing of deep-sea mining activities is not consistent with UNEP FI’s Sustainable Blue Economy Finance Principles and therefore strongly discourages financial institutions to support this nascent sector.
Indeed, the deep sea contains many of the most pristine ecosystems on our planet and plays a crucial role in regulating the climate and mitigating climate change. Plans to mine this unique and complex area of our planet would create irreversible ecosystem and habitat loss, as well as permanently destroy invaluable carbon storage.
This briefing paper is designed to help banks, insurers and investors stay away from unsustainable economic activities and consider their portfolios in light of the damaging nature of deep-sea mining activities. It is the last of a series of briefing papers on harmful marine extractives, following papers on dredging & marine aggregate extraction and offshore oil and gas.
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