Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask His Majesty's Government when the UK Deep-Sea Mining Environmental Science Network last met.

The UK is a world leader on tackling climate change and an international advocate for the highest possible environmental standards. We recognise the growing pressure to extract deep-sea resources and are concerned about the potential impacts of mining activities on the fragile marine environment.

This is why the UK supports a moratorium on the granting of exploitation licenses for deep sea mining projects by the International Seabed Authority (ISA). We will not sponsor or support the issuing of any such exploitation licences for deep sea mining by the ISA until there is sufficient scientific evidence about the potential impact on deep sea ecosystems. This is why the UK has been driving the need for strong enforceable environmental regulations, standards and guidelines to be developed by the ISA and put in place before any mining commences.

To support this, the UK successfully launched a new multi-disciplinary UK deep sea mining environmental expert network to champion UK expertise in environmental sciences, leading on filling gaps in knowledge in order to provide sufficient scientific evidence to fully understand the potential environmental impacts of deep sea mining. The Network has gained 75 members who are multidisciplinary across environmental sciences, and plans are underway for the Networks inaugural meeting to take place early in 2025.