Environmental campaigners say move will threaten marine life and put biodiversity at risk

After a 15-year dispute, the private company Nordic Mining has been given the go-ahead to dispose of 170m tons of mining waste at the bottom of the Førde fjord, which critics say will threaten marine life and put biodiversity at risk.

The decision means Norway joins only two other countries – Papua New Guinea and Turkey – who still grant new licences for marine waste disposal.

The court ordered Friends of the Earth Norway and Nature and Youth, the two environmental organisations who brought the case, to pay legal costs of about £110,000. They could still take the case to the court of appeal, but say their resources are too diminished to continue their fight.

“This contravenes the Aarhus convention, which states that access to justice in environmental matters should not be financially prohibitive,” said Truls Gulowsen, the head of Friends of the Earth Norway. “We just don’t have the money to pursue the case at this moment in time.”

He added that the verdict might discourage future lawsuits to protect the environment against commercial forces.

      • sab@kbin.social
        52·
        1 year ago

        It’s not exactly a deserted wasteland - it’s not that easy to find somewhere to dump 170m tons of mining waste without affecting some ecosystem or another.

        The fjords are pretty and symbolically nice, but the fact is that as long as there’s a demand for minerals, they have to be dug from somewhere, and ecosystems are going to be affected by it. Moving the problem somewhere else doesn’t solve anything.

        It reminds me of that time we needed rocks for road construction in Norway, and we had decided all the mountains in the region were too precious to be destroyed for that kind of purpose. So we ended up buying vast quantities stones from China rather than using locally sourced products. Which is great - that way they can fuck up their nature instead.

        If we don’t want mining we just have to stop consuming. Moving problems out of sight doesn’t solve anything.