Deep-sea mining is likely to result in biodiversity loss, and the significance of this to ecosystem function is not known. “Out of kind” biodiversity offsets substituting one ecosystem type for another have been proposed to compensate for such loss.
Here we consider a goal of no net loss of biodiversity and explore the challenges of applying this aim to deep seabed mining, based on the associated mitigation hierarchy (avoid, minimize, remediate).
Authors: Holly J. Niner,Jeff A. Ardron, Elva G. Escobar, Matthew Gianni, Aline Jaeckel, Daniel O. B. Jones, Lisa A. Levin, Craig R. Smith, Torsten Thiele, Phillip J. Turner, Cindy L. Van Dover, Les Watling and Kristina M. Gjerde.
Available in English.