Band 8 model answer: opinion (agree or disagree)

Companies such as The Metals Company are already testing machines that vacuum polymetallic nodules from the Pacific seabed near the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, chasing the cobalt and nickel that lithium-ion batteries require. This push has clear advantages, but the risks it carries for barely understood ecosystems make it a development worth pursuing only with extreme caution. The benefit most often cited is supply security. Electric vehicle and smartphone production depends on cobalt, over 60 percent of which currently comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labour in artisanal mines is a documented problem. Seabed nodules offer an alternative source that does not rely on that troubled supply chain, and for a country like Japan, which imports almost all its raw minerals, the appeal of a domestic offshore reserve is obvious. There is also an economic case: small Pacific island nations such as Nauru and Kiribati have sponsored exploration contracts, hoping that licensing fees will fund infrastructure and reduce dependence on foreign aid. However, the drawbacks are severe precisely because so little is known. The seabed at these depths hosts organisms, some possibly centuries old, that have never been catalogued, and mining machinery churns up sediment plumes that can travel for kilometres, smothering filter-feeding life far from the extraction site. A 2022 study by the UK's National Oceanography Centre found that seabed tracks made by a mining test in 1979 were still visible decades later, suggesting recovery times far longer than for most land-based ecosystems. Unlike a damaged forest, which can be replanted, a crushed hydrothermal vent community may simply never return, and since these waters lie beyond national jurisdiction, no single government bears responsibility for the damage. On balance, the economic and strategic case for deep-sea mining is real, but it should not proceed at the current pace. Until independent, long-term environmental baselines exist, comparable to the decades of research that preceded regulated commercial fishing, extraction permits should remain limited to small-scale scientific trials rather than the full-scale operations companies are now proposing.