Holding the Line Against Mining the Abyssal Plain

The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition was founded in 2004 out of alarm at deep-sea bottom trawling, which drags weighted nets across seamounts that took millennia to build. It now unites more than 140 NGOs, fishers' associations and policy institutes, and has widened its work to the push for a moratorium on deep-sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and elsewhere. Its coalition-building helped stop deep-sea mining being greenlit at the International Seabed Authority Council in July 2023, and the number of states backing a moratorium or precautionary pause has kept climbing since. On the fishing side it helped win a bottom-trawl ban across the Southern Ocean high seas, the closure of most Northwest Atlantic seamounts to bottom fishing, and an EU closure of over 16,000 square kilometres of deep sea in September 2022.