It’s often said we know more about the moon than what’s at the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps that’s why we know so little of the real, pressing and growing problem of deep sea mining. Emotive and Deep Rising set out to change that with ‘Don’t Mine What’s Mine’.
And change that they did. Working with award-winning documentary filmmaker Matthieu Rytz, Emotive worked to highlight the fact that an area the size of India has already been carved up for corporations to mine on the Pacific seabed.
That mining might be out of sight, but it has consequences that affect the whole world. The ocean provides half the planet’s oxygen and, by international law, the seabed is the “common heritage of humankind”. Yet the International Seabed Authority, created to protect it, is also granting licences to exploit it.
Emotive and Rytz’s work was a triumph and it won the B&T Award for the Planet in the process. Here, CEO Simon Joyce and creative director Paul Sharp reflect on the campaign and winning the B&T Award for the Planet last week.
Through deeprising.com, it launched The World’s Largest Ocean Dispute. The threatened zone was divided into 8.17 billion GPS coordinates, one for every person alive. Each could be claimed as a personal plot, recorded on a carbon-positive blockchain with an NFT Birthright Certificate. Not a petition, but ownership.
The campaign unfolded in three waves. The Deep Rising documentary streamed on Apple, Amazon and Google, exposing cracks in international law. A digital protest was spread through out of home and social media, brought to life with NFT Birthright Certificates. And a global voice, led by Jason Momoa and Pacific leaders, carried the “Common Heritage” message into the halls of power.
The impact was felt around the globe, with six nations shifting their stance, clearing the way for the first moratorium on deep-sea mining. Today, 38 nations support the ban, laying the foundation for legal action at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
