Aquaculture is the most efficient process to produce animal proteins and general food. The activity has been performed worldwide in different scales, aims, and using different business plans. According to the current economic changing world, some modern concepts should be applied to the aquaculture business.
Bioeconomy is a new concept related to economic activities based on the use of biological products and processes . Bioeconomy includes innovations, new inventions, development and production of live organisms or biomolecules, using technology that boost productivity, create new products and processes, and enhance environmental sustainability . Certainly, aquaculture has a huge potential to be a major segment of bioeconomy in the present century.
Circular economy is an economic system aiming to reduce the use of natural resources and wastes. This system creates a loop, minimizing the use of resource inputs and the creation of wastes and pollution . The recycle principle is a major element. The wastes produced in a process should feed a complementary process. Circular economy is based on principles of "take, make, use, reuse, recycle and remake," whereas the traditional linear economy is based on "take, make and dispose." In aquaculture, t he monocultures intensively fed roughly match the principles of the linear economy, whereas the integrated multitrophic systems match the circular economy.
The circular bioeconomy processes are believed to be more sustainable and essential to the future of human society. However, sustainability does not include only environmental but should be approached by three dimensions (scopes): economic, environmental, and social. All of them are important and should be equally considered. The huge difficulty to evaluate sustainability is the challenge to explore and analyze a system in a holistic way. It is essential to contemplate all dimensions of the production process and compare measurements of variables from different nature.
A quaculture may be divided into parts, which may be evaluated using sets of indicators; the se indicators can be combined originating more general indexes. For each dimension, indicators should reflect the key features. These indicators should be estimated using good quality and scientific data and, after that, they can be converted to a performance scale according to criteria scientifically defined (example : we may attribute zero for the worse score and 100 for the best one). Then, the indicators can be combined to obtain a subindex for each dimension. The arithmetic average among the three subindexes will generate the sustainability index.
Selected indicators and/or indexes may be used by scientists to evaluate different treatments of an experiment, by investors and policymakers to evaluate different projects to be supported, or by farmers to adequate their farming systems towards sustainable production.