24,000 want stop on seabed mining

Source: The National, Thursday 25th October, 2012 By CALDRON LAEPA A PETITION, signed by 24,000 people living in the immediate area of the controversial seabed mining site in the Bismarck Sea, has requested the government to stop the project and review its approval process. Bismarck-Solomon Sea Indigenous People’s Council president John Simoi presented the petition to Mining Minister Byron Chan and government representatives this week. Simoi said the petition was over dissatisfaction with the project’s environmental impact studies (EIS). He said the project had commissioned Prof Richard Steiner from the University of Alaska in 2010 to produce a report that showed the EIS approved by the Department of Environment and Conservation was not satisfactory. “The sea is our garden. That is where we get our food to survive. “We cannot let the investor destroy this. We are asking the government to put a moratorium for, say 10 years, on deep-sea mining or stop deep-sea mining,” he said. The people, including landowners from Madang, Northern and New Britain provinces signed the petition, saying they did not want Canadian-owned Nautilus Minerals’ Solwara 1 project to go ahead. The project is the first of its kind in the world and will see minerals – mostly copper and gold – extracted from the ocean floor. Nautilus was granted a 20-year lease by the government of Sir Michael Somare and plans to mine an area 1.6km beneath the ocean, 50km off the coast of New Britain.