Spread a map of the Cook Islands across a table and you will notice something unusual: there is almost no land. Fifteen small islands, home to roughly 17,000 people, sit scattered across an expanse of the South Pacific so vast that the nation is, relative to its population, one of the largest ocean states on Earth. Its waters cover about 772,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers), an area that, counting the seabed of its recently recognized extended continental shelf, reaches roughly 888,000 square miles (2.3 million square kilometers).
"About 99.9% of the Cook Islands is ocean," says Beverly Stacey Ataera, Commissioner of the Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority (SBMA). It is a statistic that frames everything her office does. The Cook Islands is not a country with a coastline. It is a country that is, almost entirely, the sea itself.
And resting on the floor of that sea, roughly five kilometers beneath the surface, lies a resource that has drawn the attention of governments, scientists, and investors around the world: polymetallic nodules. Small, black, and about the size of a golf ball, these formations have accumulated on the abyssal plain over millions of years. Inside each one are the metals that modern economies increasingly cannot do without, cobalt, nickel, manganese, copper, and rare earth elements.
"These minerals are essential for the global energy transition," Ataera explains. "They're used in batteries, solar panels, wind energy systems, and high-efficiency jet engine technologies." The scale of future demand is difficult to overstate. By her account, the world is expected to consume as much cobalt over the next 15 years as it has across the previous 120. Land-based mining, she notes, is unlikely to keep pace with that surge "without considerable environmental and social consequences."
That tension, rising global need set against the limits of terrestrial supply, is what places a nation of 17,000 people unexpectedly close to the center of one of the defining industrial questions of the century. But Ataera is careful never to let the conversation race ahead of itself.
"The real question is not simply whether the resource exists. It clearly does," she says. "It's whether it can be accessed responsibly and in an environmentally acceptable manner. Today, we don't know if that is the case."
It would be easy to mistake the SBMA for an agency built to launch an industry. It is not. The Authority is a national regulator, and Ataera is emphatic about the distinction.
"At this stage, we are strictly in the exploration phase," she says. "No decision has been made on whether the Cook Islands will proceed to mineral harvesting or mining." The SBMA's job, as she describes it, is to design and enforce the governance systems that oversee exploration, setting the rules, holding licensees to them, and building the body of knowledge that any eventual decision would have to rest upon.
The requirements placed on license holders are extensive and, importantly, public. Operators must complete environmental baseline studies, collect and submit scientific data, demonstrate commercial viability, and meet detailed operational reporting and compliance standards. The SBMA places inspectors aboard research vessels, requires continuous reporting, and reviews all activity against the country's long-term interests.
What makes the framework distinctive is that economic and environmental questions are not weighed separately or sequentially. Through a joint mandate with the National Environment Service (NES), they are assessed at the same time.
"It's not simply a question of economic opportunity versus environmental risk," Ataera says. "If operators cannot demonstrate that the activity is commercially viable while preserving environmental integrity, then it is unlikely to proceed." In other words, a project that pencils out financially but damages the deep ocean fails the test, just as surely as one that is environmentally sound but commercially hollow.
For the Cook Islands, the appeal of getting this equation right is considerable. The national economy leans heavily on tourism, supported by external aid and a handful of other sectors. The pandemic exposed how dangerous that concentration can be.
"As we saw during COVID-19, that limited diversity can expose us to severe economic shocks," Ataera says. A responsibly developed minerals sector could, in principle, transform the country's finances and broaden its economic base for generations.
Yet she returns again and again to a single, non-negotiable condition: environmental stewardship. And she is quick to dispel a common misunderstanding about what seabed mining would and would not touch.
"There's often a misconception that deep-sea mining would somehow affect our lagoons or visible coastal areas," she says. "That's not the case." The nodules lie far offshore in the deep ocean, well away from the turquoise lagoons that visitors picture when they imagine the Cook Islands. The country has also established marine protected areas as an added safeguard.
To convey the true footprint of any potential activity, Ataera offers an analogy that has become something of a signature. "Imagine our entire Exclusive Economic Zone as a rugby field," she says. "The total area that could potentially be mined over 30 years would be roughly the size of the scrum in the middle of the field." Against more than 772,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) of ocean, the potential disturbance is, by that measure, vanishingly small.
The Authority is also developing habitat-focused conservation policies and marine spatial planning frameworks designed to protect biodiversity and ecosystem function across the many different types of seabed environment within its waters. Underpinning all of it is a single guiding idea.
"Our approach is based on the precautionary principle," Ataera says. "Science first, evidence first, and no decisions without robust environmental data."
That principle is more than rhetoric. The Cook Islands' seabed minerals legislation and regulations have already been revised three times since 2012, each revision, Ataera says, reflecting how much the country's understanding has evolved.
The Authority invests in baseline environmental data, seabed mapping, oceanographic research, independent scientific validation, and external technical review. A dedicated in-house science team, which includes award-winning Cook Islands scientists, interprets the findings. "We work from a position of knowledge," she says. "Our principle is simple: if science does not support it, we do not proceed."
Perhaps the most striking part of the program is that its value is already being realized, regardless of whether a single nodule is ever harvested. The same seafloor mapping and oceanographic research being gathered for minerals assessment is now feeding directly into tsunami modeling, hazard mapping, early warning systems, and fisheries infrastructure planning.
"Even if extraction never happens," Ataera says, "the science and knowledge of investment are already strengthening national resilience and public safety." For a low-lying Pacific nation acutely exposed to natural hazards, that dividend is not incidental. It is, in many ways, the point.
It also reframes how the country thinks about its place in the world. As a Pacific island nation, Ataera notes, the Cook Islands is already on the front line of climate change, with rising seas posing a direct threat. That reality cuts two ways: it gives the country a stake in the clean-energy transition that seabed minerals could help supply, and it sharpens its insistence that any contribution must never come at the cost of its own environment.
"We feel a responsibility to explore whether we can contribute to the global shift towards renewable energy," she says, "but only if it does not create unacceptable risks for our own environment."
No country of 17,000 people can shoulder deep-ocean science alone, and the Cook Islands has not tried to. The Authority currently works with some 27 to 28 international partners, including institutions in the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
The American relationships, Ataera says, have been especially productive. Collaboration with U.S. agencies such as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been "exceptional," and the partners are jointly developing a strategic research plan.
These connections feed into an ambition that reaches well beyond minerals. The Cook Islands is advancing a concept it calls the Institute of Blue Ocean Science and Sustainability, or IBOSS, a plan to turn the country into a global hub for deep-sea research and blue-economy innovation.
"The vision is to make the Cook Islands a global hub for deep-sea scientific research," Ataera says, "where researchers from around the world can come to conduct fieldwork, complete doctoral research, and collaborate on ocean science." If it succeeds, IBOSS could become a durable, knowledge-based source of economic growth, one that does not depend on extraction at all.
Running through every part of the program is a commitment to public trust, which Ataera treats as a precondition rather than a nicety. The Authority practices open dialogue, public consultation, and full data transparency, and all of its environmental data is made publicly accessible. Communities are updated regularly on where the process stands.
She is also careful to clarify the limits of her own office's authority, a point she clearly considers essential to honest public engagement.
"The SBMA does not decide whether the Cook Islands proceed with extraction," she says. "There's a governance process around that. Our role is to ensure that the information and governance framework are in place so that the people of the Cook Islands and their government can make an informed decision." The regulator builds the evidence and the rules; the nation makes the choice.
"Transparency is the foundation of trust," she says.
For now, the work remains firmly fixed on exploration and understanding. The current five-year exploration licenses expire on February 20, 2027, and renewal, Ataera stresses, is not a formality. License holders must reapply and again satisfy scientific, environmental, and operational criteria.
Some operators may eventually move toward trial mineral harvesting, a testing phase, she is careful to note, that is still not commercial extraction. Its purpose would be to determine whether the technology can operate effectively while protecting the environment.
In parallel, the country is thinking through the broader national readiness any future industry would demand: airports, roads, hospitals, and the regulatory capacity to govern a sector of real scale. "For a nation of only 17,000 people, this is a major undertaking," she says.
Asked what she would want readers in Los Angeles to take away, Ataera does not reach for promises. She reaches for principle.
"The Cook Islands are approaching seabed minerals with care, discipline, and responsibility," she says. "We understand what is at stake, economically, environmentally, and for future generations. Our approach is grounded in science, governance, transparency, and long-term sustainability."
A decision to proceed, she adds, would come only if the sector meets the highest environmental and scientific standards and delivers lasting benefits to her people. "But every part of that equation must be acceptable."
Then she offers the line that has, in effect, become the country's governing philosophy, a phrase as much about humility as ambition.
"We only get one chance to get this right."
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