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Aquaculture needs more effective governance to be sustainable
The aquaculture sector provides about the same amount of food worldwide as wild caught fisheries or the egg sector, yet many important questions remain unanswered about the sector’s environmental and social impacts. A recent study co-authored by researchers at the Environmental Policy research group (ENP) and published in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability suggests five focal areas that can guide research agendas and policy making.
Five Priority Areas for Policy & Research
The study reviews the most recent literature and synthesizes expert advice to suggest five priority areas for research and policymaking:
(1) setting sustainability transformation goals, (2) cross-sectoral linkages, (3) land–water–sea connectivity, (4) knowledge and innovation, and (5) value chains.
These five areas highlight the need to balance social, economic and environmental outcomes, and how aquaculture is connected with other important food and economic sectors, suggesting the need for joint decision-making in the ministries, agencies and institutions responsible for agenda setting and resource allocation.
Improved governance is critically important for ensuring that aquaculture does not cause more harm than benefits. However, current knowledge and practices related to aquaculture governance currently lack a set of unifying topics and sustainability goals. This is in part due to aquaculture’s rapid expansion and intensification over the last two decades, in part outpacing the ability of research and policy to catch up.
As state ministries worldwide now begin to think more concretely about governance issues in the sector, the five priority areas for aquaculture governance identified in this paper provide a starting point for more unified approaches to economic, policy and environmental planning for the sector.