Aquaculture is an economic driver for coastal and Indigenous communities on the East and West coasts of Canada and an area of opportunity for the Northern Territories. While the industry has the potential to expand significantly, thereby providing the basis for new employment opportunities and enhanced production techniques in Atlantic Canada, the aquaculture sector faces challenges that can only be successfully addressed by taking an integrated and interdisciplinary approach that connects innovations in the technical and operational aspects of fish farming with society's willingness to fully embrace the sector.
The challenges linked to aquaculture production are widely recognized. They include: infectious diseases, environmental and health impacts on workers and consumers, and ecosystemic interactions. From a societal perspective, the seemingly intractable challenge for the sector has been the difficulty of gaining full acceptance of aquaculture as a complementary valued activity along with other more established uses of the coastal and marine environment. Despite its promise, aquaculture has not been overly successful at achieving and sustaining the social licence needed to fully obtain the benefits that it can provide. We argue that the future development of sustainable aquaculture requires ground-breaking, interdisciplinary 'outside the box' research and development that tightly couple science, innovation and societal needs in a manner that allows for the local and global opportunities within aquaculture to be realized through a societally endorsed, sustainable aquaculture.
Our research takes a holistic and integrative approach to addressing the challenges confronting the sector by linking researchers in the natural sciences with experts in sustainable community development, occupational health and safety, marine management and marine spatial planning. We focus on understanding social licence by explicitly linking knowledge generated with underlying value systems, behaviour and policy change. To do this, our research sheds light on: (i) advancing mechanisms to enhance global leadership in the theory and practice of societally endorsed sustainable aquaculture; (ii) anticipating and addressing occupational health and safety hazards in marine and coastal work associated with aquaculture and its interactions with other marine uses; (iii) improving understanding of other areas of concern that affect social licence such as farmed escapes and waste generation; (iv) filling a significant gap in understanding ecological and social carrying capacity for finfish aquaculture to better predict feasibility of siting locations; and (v) mobilizing knowledge on the processes, parameters, and implementation tools essential for an adaptive, dynamic community-based marine spatial planning system for a societally endorsed, sustainable aquaculture.