Sharm el-Sheikh | Billionaire miner and philanthropist Andrew Forrest has committed his Fortescue Metals Group to a moratorium on mining the ocean floor, warning that ecosystems could be destroyed before their value was understood.

“The deep seabed supports some of the least understood ecosystems on the planet. It’s critically important to ecological processes affecting our entire ocean and yet our scientific knowledge of it remains extremely limited,” Dr Forrest said at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.