In recent years, pressure on global food production has increased alarmingly. The Food Price Index, averaged across meat, dairy, cereals, vegetables, and sugar increased from between 91.9 to 98.1 over 2015 to 2020, to a peak of 143.7 in 2022 (FAO, 2024). There is an urgent need to shift food production toward food types, locations, and production systems that can enhance food security for a growing and increasingly wealthy human population while reducing environmental degradation (Halpern et al., 2022). Operating an offshore food production system poses considerable challenges, but despite th is, there is an opportunity in which responsible farming can be developed based on scientifically sound information to ensure long-term sustainability. By moving away from traditional seafood production systems characterised by intensification, specialisation, and geographic concentration that potentially leads to negative anthropogenic impacts (Dumont et al., 2020), complementary layers of seafood production and marine products can be integrated within and between producers and other users. This purposeful integration of multiple species into offshore aquaculture systems could bring sustainability through increased productivity, efficient resource use, and increased farm resilience.
Fundamental to the success of integrated offshore aquaculture systems is systematic species selection . Although i t’s well understood that the integration of species, such as finfish with seaweed and shellfish, have the potential to improve sustainability, the process in which decisions on species selection should be made is lacking. This presentation will discuss a structured approach to rank species best suited for integrated offshore aquaculture systems across geographic regions, from temperature to tropical, in Australia and New Zealand. By doing so, a species selection process is demonstrated that explores which existing and emerging species could be viably integrated into offshore aquaculture systems thereby creating a pathway for future decision-making to support research or commercial investment.
Dumont, B., Puillet, L., Martin, G., et al. (2020). Incorporating diversity into animal production systems can increase their performance and strengthen their resilience. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 4, p.109.
FAO (2024). World Food Situation. Accessed 25/1/2024 , https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en.
Halpern, B.S., Frazier, M., Verstaen, J. et al. (2022). The environmental footprint of global food production. Nature Sustainability, 5, p.1027–1039.