Last week I attended (online) the world ocean summit week organised by The Economist . Amongst many interesting talks about blue carbon, offsetting and other more economical issues , there were various debates on the future of fisheries and Aquaculture. Yes, because fish is something we came to rely on. We have a per capita consumption of fish of 20 kg per year. About 50 g a day, or approximately a sardine , if we each ate it daily. Which doesn’t sound like necessarily a lot if we think about individual consumption, but these values were an average computed by taking all of the world population. Some will eat more , some much less. But this is the average so you would need to multiply it for the however many billions that human population is, and you can see that is unsustainable if we don’t want to fish everything that is in the sea out. This is where aquaculture comes in handy . And aquaculture has suffered from a bad rep - it has been portrayed as something that keeps fish in bad conditions overcrowded , prone to illnesses , full of antibiotic, over fed, with negative impacts on the surrounding environment due to the high amount of organic material deposited . It has also been portrayed as something that creates a lot of waste . All in all - not great! But this may be an old portray. Why not try to paint a new one? Because aquaculture CAN be improved and THERE IS research going on trying to do just that. I am not just saying this because my own research group is heavily involved in this with a project (that is coming towards its end) called GAIN which stands for greening aquaculture intensification (check the GAIN website here and follow us on the various socials if you wish to find out the newest things, i suggest the twitter channel, which I may or may be not in charge of..). I am saying this because there are (finally) some investments being made towards this line of research and is good to update ones knowledge in order to avoid having preconceptions based upon old stuff. The range of research topics within aquaculture is very vast . Money and effort are being invested towards reducing the use of antibiotics while of course keeping the food chain up to us humans healthy and safe: this is one of the topics of the green deal and the funding that just closed and will continue throughout the next ‘horizon’ calls . Another big thing is the use of new technologies- and the project New Tech Aqua , in which some of my colleagues are also heavily involved, is looking at that. We have the technologies so we should learn how to best use it for good , to maximise the use of resources and avoid mass mortalities - making it more ethical from all perspectives. Use of technologies in the right way can also maximise the feeding , avoiding wastage. Feeding in aquaculture is actually one of the biggest sustainability issues , because often it is the case that fish from the sea is used to feed fish in cages (with a loss of mass as we move up the ‘food chain’, with farmed fish requiring 1.1 kg of feed to gain 1 kg of body mass, although bear in mind that poultry requires 1.7 and cattle 6.6!). But if feeding is optimised, nutrient cycling is taken into consideration and IMTA (integrated multitrophic aquaculture) is considered when possible, then aquaculture is not that bad at all. And maybe, we can ‘matchmake’ aquaculture with restoration, as I am proposing in my upcoming research project, so you will hear more about this in the future (you can go and have a look at MAREA here on the European projects website) I am sure I will get back to this topic and will help you stay up to date, at this stage I am just asking you to be open minded, not just on this but other issues. And realise that research is important and essential to us moving forward and finding some solutions.
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