The Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre brings together over 40 partners from 10 countries to grow the blue economy around seafood and renewable energy production. There are five research programs (www.blueeconmycrc.com.au) including seafood and marine products. Australia and New Zealand have some of the world’s largest Exclusive Economic Zones that offer extensive access to offshore locations with unrealised potential for aquaculture (Gentry et al., 2017) and renewable energy. The BECRC aims to tap into this potential and use new systems to move production offshore safely, economically and sustainably. The BECRC will operate until the end of this decade and this presentation aims to outline current and planned R&D building blocks to advance sustainable offshore aquaculture.
Established R&D building blocks are provided by salmon aquaculture, current production in the region is relatively small on a global scale but extremely valuable nationally. For example, Tasmania is the country’s largest seafood producing State by value which is mainly attributable to farmed Atlantic salmon aquaculture: in 2019/20 Atlantic salmon accounted for well over half of Australian aquaculture (55% value, 62% production) and 29% of the value of all Australian seafood. The Australian and New Zealand salmon industries aspire to world best practice and can be characterised as both innovative and a fast adopter of new technologies. Recently, both industries have started to explore moving to offshore sites in order to expand beyond their limited coastal sites. The seas are relatively high energy and pose considerable technological challenges as well as unknown questions about salmon production biology that the BECRC partners are investigating. Seaweed aquaculture is only very recently emerging as a potential industry in Australian and New Zealand. Consequently, seaweeds require different R&D building blocks to salmon, these range from establishing farming technology to understanding the values that seaweeds may have, these include as quality human food, a source of high value extractives, nutrient sequestration and potential for hydrodynamic attenuation in exposed sites. Future R&D building blocks will be outlined and concern offshore systems in sub-tropical and tropical regions, species selection, the use of multiple species and integration among seafood production as well as with renewable energy.
The presentation aims to consider opportunity and options for sustainable integrated offshore aquaculture systems with a focus on establishing BECRC R&D building blocks and pathways.