Framework for environmental risk assessment and management of deep-sea mineral mining of massive seafloor sulfide deposits
Master thesis
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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3026211Utgivelsesdato
2022Metadata
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Sammendrag
The global interest in exploiting deep-sea minerals has increased over the last couple of decades due tothe rising demand for valuable metals required for technological development. However, due tosignificant scientific and technological knowledge gaps and uncertain economic risks, no commercialexploitation of deep-sea resources has yet been initiated (Jak et al., 2014). To help develop appropriateenvironmental management and monitoring plans and to assist in establishing necessary standards andguidelines for future environmental impact assessments, this thesis provides a comprehensive list ofpotential hazards of seafloor-massive-sulfide mining with risk-related and other environmentalmanagement factors. It also includes evaluations of the importance and priority of the hazards forinclusion in the ecological risk framework. From the list of identified hazards, the essential ones werefurther elaborated in terms of consequences for the marine environment. The rest of the hazards weregrouped into scale-dependent and knowledge-dependent for future evaluations of importance, relevance,and priority. It is, at present, difficult to predict the relevance and importance of scale-dependent andknowledge-dependent hazards. Once more knowledge about the physical effects of particles and theirecological and toxicological effects is gathered, the decision of whether these hazards should be includedin the environmental risk assessment framework may be made.