Editor’s note: The author asks if that is a good thing. The short answer is no. For the same reason, agriculture is bad for the land, aquaculture is bad for the ocean. It is because humans have overcaught wild fish and depleted their numbers that people have more and more gone to aquaculture. There are now just too many human mouths to feed and not enough fish in the oceans.
By Frida Garza / Grist
Both aquaculture and fisheries have environmental and climate impacts — and they overlap more than you’d think
A new report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, has found that more fish were farmed worldwide in 2022 than harvested from the wild, an apparent first.
Last week, the FAO released its annual report on the state of aquaculture — which refers to the farming of both seafood and aquatic plants — and fisheries around the world. The organization found that global production from both aquaculture and fisheries reached a new high — 223.3 million metric tons of animals and plants — in 2022. Of that, 185.4 million metric tons were aquatic animals, and 37.8 million metric tons were algae. Aquaculture was responsible for 51 percent of aquatic animal production in 2022, or 94.4 metric tons.
The milestone was in many ways an expected one, given the world’s insatiable appetite for seafood. Since 1961, consumption of seafood has grown at twice the annual rate of the global population, according to the FAO. Because production levels from fisheries are not expected to change significantly in the future, meeting the growing global demand for seafood almost certainly necessitates an increase in aquaculture.
Though fishery production levels fluctuate from year to year, “it’s not like there’s new fisheries out there waiting to be discovered,” said Dave Martin, program director for Sustainable Fisheries Partnerships, an international organization that works to reduce the environmental impact of seafood supply chains. “So any growth in consumption of seafood is going to come from aquaculture.”
But the rise of aquaculture underscores the need to transform seafood systems to minimize their impact on the planet. Both aquaculture and fisheries — sometimes referred to as capture fisheries, as they involve the capture of wild seafood — come with significant environmental and climate considerations. What’s more, the two systems often depend on each other, making it difficult to isolate their climate impacts.
“There’s a lot of overlap between fisheries and aquaculture that the average consumer may not see,” said Dave Love, a research professor at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.
Studies have shown that the best diet for the planet is one free of animal protein. Still, seafood generally has much lower greenhouse gas emissions than other forms of protein from land-based animals. And given many people’s unwillingness or inability to go vegan, the FAO recommends transforming, adapting, and expanding sustainable seafood production to feed the world’s growing population and improve food security.
But “there’s a lot of ways to do aquaculture well, and there’s a lot of ways to do it poorly,” said Martin. Aquaculture can result in nitrogen and phosphorus being released into the natural environment, damaging aquatic ecosystems. Farmed fish can also spread disease to wild populations, or escape from their confines and breed with other species, resulting in genetic pollution that can disrupt the fitness of a wild population. Martin points to the diesel fuel used to power equipment on certain fish farms as a major source of aquaculture’s environmental impact. According to an analysis from the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, swapping out fossil fuel-based generators on fish farms for renewable-powered hybrids would prevent 500 million to 780 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2050.
Other areas for improvement will vary depending on the specific species being farmed. In 2012, a U.N. study found that mangrove forests — a major carbon sink — have suffered greatly due to the development of shrimp and fish farming. Today, industry stakeholders have been exploring how new approaches and techniques from shrimp farmers can help restore mangroves.
Meanwhile, wild fishing operations present their own environmental problems. For example, poorly managed fisheries can harvest fish more quickly than wild populations can breed, a phenomenon known as overfishing. Certain destructive wild fishing techniques also kill a lot of non-targeted species, known as bycatch, threatening marine biodiversity.
But the line between aquaculture and fish harvested from the wild isn’t as clear as it may seem. For example, pink salmon that are raised in hatcheries and then released into the wild to feed, mature, and ultimately be caught again are often marketed as “wild caught.” Lobsters, caught wild in Maine, are often fed bait by fisherman to help them put on weight. “It’s a wild fishery,” said Love — but the lobster fishermen’s practice of fattening up their catch shows how human intervention is present even in wild-caught operations.
On the flipside, in a majority of aquaculture systems, farmers provide their fish with feed. That feed sometimes includes fish meal, says Love, a powder that comes from two sources: seafood processing waste (think: fish guts and tails) and wild-caught fish.
All of this can result in a confusing landscape for climate- or environmentally-conscientious consumers who eat fish. But Love recommends a few ways in which consumers can navigate choice when shopping for seafood. Buying fresh fish locally helps shorten supply chains, which can lower the carbon impact of eating aquatic animals. “In our work, we’ve found that the big impact from transport is shipping fresh seafood internationally by air,” he said. Most farmed salmon, for example, sold in the U.S. is flown in.
From both a climate and a nutritional standpoint, smaller fish and sea vegetables are also both good options. “Mussels, clams, oysters, seaweed — they’re all loaded with macronutrients and minerals in different ways” compared to fin fish, said Love.
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
Photo by Datingscout on Unsplash
I lived for 30 years in a small town at the end of an inlet on the Pacific Ocean called Port Alberni (Vancouver Island). The inlet was fed by a river system connected to lakes for spawning. Overfishing has gone on for decades there. There are 3 user groups fighting for fish, commercial leases, sport fisherman and First Nations netting in the river. After commercial openings the sport fishery catch rates drop dramatically for 3-4 days. In reality the entire sport and commercial season should be shut down for at least a decade but the Canadian Federal Government (Department of Fisheries and Oceans -DFO)) has a political mandate as opposed to monitoring the returns to determine how much can be sustainably caught. Federal and Provincial legislation is basically not enforceable in regards to fish habitat.
On top of this decades of industrial logging has decimated fish habitat. There is no significant work being done to logging roads built in riparian zones that release enormous amounts of sediment into river systems. There is plenty of Federal Dollars to do fish habitat restoration work but very few projects are started. As far as the First Nations Populations (33 bands on Southern Vancouver Island) some bands support and are involved in Fish Farming and some are trying to block fish farms. The same applies to industrial logging. Some bands have been granted treaty settlement land and soon after started clearcut logging on their land base.
I travelled miles of logging roads over a 30 year period and would regularly stop and observe spawning channels in the fall. The last few years the decline in returns is shocking.
Clayoquot sound on Vancouver Island has several fish farms. The Provincial Ministry enforcing fish farming legislation again has legislation that is unenforceable.
http://www.fisherycrisis.com/CO2/strangelove2.htm
The world urgently needs a total 100% BAN on ALL commercial fishing world wide for AT LEAST the next 100 years for fish stocks to recover. Since that is obviously not going to happen and fish farming only makes things worse by risking contaminating wild fish populations with defective genes, the problem is unsolvable and the fishing will go on until there are so few fish left that all fishing becomes impractical.
Going vegan is not going to help either. By then the climate in most places will have become so random, unpredictable, and chaotic that land-based agriculture will also collapse and the huge overbloom of humans will starve to death, thus releiving the world of the excessive human footprint so whatever is left of the biosphere can begin to recover.
The few human survivors, if there are any, will live by subststence hunting and fishing since farming will be useless until the climate stabilizes in a few centuries.
I love oysters, but over the past 10-15 years I noticed that they were losing their flavor. Turns out that the reason is that 90% of them are now farmed. Since flavor = nutrition when it comes to natural unprocessed food, the nutritional value of farmed oysters is clearly not as good as the value of wild ones. Same with salmon, and it’s also true for land animals.
Of course what’s important here is not human enjoyment from eating or even nutritional value to humans. But what this clearly shows is that destroying the Earth also destroys humans.
Thank you for this observation. It is also true for farmed plants too. The agricultural revolution in Neolithic times was a bad mistake. No farmed food is equal in nutrient value to natural food and there is evidence that humans deteriorated sharply in size, life-span, and health when they took up farming instead of hunting. The maximum production of protein per acre from sunlight per acre possible is the natural plant and animal cover of that acre. Any artificial interference can only decrease the food value produced by that acre.
It is a race to see which will happen first, the collapse of human civilization or the collapse of the biosphere. The sooner civilization collapses the more of the biosphere will be left to start the long process of recovery from the Human Age. Instead of all the current hysterical and ultimately impossible efforts to prevent the collapse and simultaneously feed all the excess humans now living, efforts should be directed at two projects:
( 1 ) Preserving as much as possible of species and habitats, especially relatively undisturbed wilderness areas, to serve as refugia or seedbeds of plants and animals that will spread out and recolonize their former range after the humans are gone, and ( 2 ) sabotage of infrastructure on a large scale to hasten the final stages of the collapse of civilization in hopes that it can be made to happen soon enough that at least some of the biosphere will be left so the earth can eventually recover from the Invasion Of The Humans.
But instead, we are seeing more and more futile efforts to prevent the end of civilization and allow all the extra humans to survive past their species expiration date. The so-called ”environmental movement has lost it’s way and degenerated into nothing but a confused series of projects to avoid facing reality. Fish farming, genetic modification of crops and livestock, preaching abstinence from meat or substituting lab grown meat or insects for meat, use of insecticides and herbicides, electric cars, solar power screens, and a long list of other useless flailing around will do nothing but make things worse.