Balancing the Value of Living and Nonliving Resources in the Deep Sea

New industrialization opportunities in the deep-sea (e.g. minerals and methane hydrates) and expanding current uses of sea floor resources (e.g. oil and gas, deep-sea trawling) require society to determine whether to allow destruction of the sea floor for economic gain and to what degree the extraction of deep-sea resources must be offset by environmental mitigation and restoration.  In this presentation, we examine the social, ecological, and technical criteria that ought to be weighed when determining the tradeoffs that must be made if we are to extract non-living resources from the deep-sea.  We highlight what we know, don't know, and need to know to make sound economic decisions for deep-sea management.