Bright orange, 61m long, and 16m wide, the Anuanua Moana jars against the crystal blue waters of the Cook Islands. Kelvin Passfield hasn’t seen the research vessel head out to survey the ocean floor so much recently, but when he does it serves as a bad omen: its work is making the small island nation the new frontier of environmental extraction.
Its survey work is part of the first steps towards seabed mining, a controversial practice where machines trawl up to 6000m below the surface for nickel, manganese and cobalt. These metals are in demand for building electric cars, wind farms and batteries, and advocates argue sea bed mining could speed-up the green transition away from fossil fuels.
But Passfield, the technical director of Te Ipukarea Society, an environmental organisation in the Cook Islands, fears it will cause devastating and irreparable harm to poorly-understood, complex ecosystems and marine life living in the ocean’s depths, just as the world teeters on climate and biodiversity breakdown.
“You will never fix what you damage down there, it has taken millions of years to form,” Passfield explained.
He sees deep sea mining as the latest existential threat to life in the Cook Islands, a group of 15 islands with more than 17,000 inhabitants, and a realm country of New Zealand. Cook Islanders have New Zealand passports, and use the New Zealand dollar.