Excerpt from pacificislandtimes.com
Any adverse impacts from leasing the Northern Mariana Islands' outer continental shelf for seabed mining will likely affect a wider area, including Guam, according to the Bureau of Statistics and Plans.
Lola Leon Guerrero, the bureau's director, noted that the proposed mining site, as outlined by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is only about 128 nautical miles from Guam, near enough so that any negative impacts will likely disturb the territory.
“Such an impact could pose a significant threat to the biodiversity of the Mariana Trench and the surrounding seamounts, which are globally recognized hotspots, and could consequently compromise the ecosystem function within Guam's exclusive economic zone,” Leon Guerrero said in her written testimony read by Edwin Reyes, BSP administrator, at a public hearing on Wednesday.