INTRODUCTION
Oceans space offers a vast opportunity to meet marine protein demand with sustainable, safe and efficient fish farming, but how do we maintain safety of asset, personnel and prevent fish escape together with maintaining fish welfare and reducing emissions. Adding safety to fish farming operations is mainly ensured by providing uniformity, transparency, and predictability and thereby securing the total safety performance. This paper reflects and address overall risk perspectives combined with applicable taxonomy of essential risk items crucial for maintaining safe aquaculture operations in ocean space.
MAIN APPROACH
The main areas of concern when it comes to ensuring safe and reliable fish farming units may be categories into: Asset integrity, personnel safety, fish welfare, maintaining ocean health and prevention of fish escape. An integrated risk methodology based on these four items results in a cost-efficient approach to reduce operational risk and establish sufficient safety level.
2.1 Asset integrity
Asset integrity includes structural strength, stability, mooring, technical arrangement, and solutions on board together with reliability of essential equipment installed. Integrity of vessel or installation itself is directly relevant to existing scheme for qualification or classification. Experience from more than 50 years of design and operation of complex steel structures in demanding marine environment are compiled in the classification rules. This maritime execution model (classification) has been applied in the six first fish farming installations put into operation in Europe.
2.2 Personnel safety
Personnel safety is mainly addressing arrangement for emergency escape and fire safety. Maintaining Health, Safety and Environment for personnel working on board a fish farming installation is demanding since challenging task are performed daily in hash, marine environment. Special considerations need to be taken due to offshore/maritime operational mode. This included lifesaving appliances, launching equipment and similar as well as fire detection and -extinguishing. It is common to apply well know maritime IMO-codes as acceptance criteria for personnel safety. These codes also describe certification process and how to prototype test to ensure reliable safety equipment on board. SOLAS is a good example followed by local flag- or shelf states interpretation of requirements embedded in this maritime code.
2.3 Fish welfare
Fish welfare and requirements related to this varies depending on local authorities. It is essential to verify the reliability of technology utilized to monitor environment of the fish. Instrumentation indicating oxygen level, temperature, salinity, turbidity is subject for special attention. Maximum acceptable level of biomass is also a crucial parameter that needs to be monitored.
In general capability and reliability of the equipment and systems on the installation that affects welfare, health and physical condition of finfish need to be addressed systematically. As a result, items for fish welfare on board such as cleaning, exposure to chemicals, medication, crowding, fish transfer and monitoring of health condition are of the essence.
2.4 Ocean health
A significant risk in ocean aquaculture is substandard sustainability due to emissions from fish farming installation. It is considered essential to monitor and limit pollution from e.g. fish waste, feed surplus, chemical substances from net cleaning and emissions from medical treatment of feed stock. This to ensure that environmental impact of fish farming operation does not exceed the sustainability limits of marine environment. Sustainable aqua operation is mainly achieved through monitoring performance and ensuring that biodiversity targets for marine environment are reached.
2.5 Fish control
Fish control or prevention of escape is the main function of a fish farming unit. Structural integrity of net system and ropes together with capability of fish transfer systems are crucial items in fish control. Flexible net systems utilized in rigid high volume steel fish farming installation has proven to be exposed to fatigue and need to be attended to in particular. Wear and tear of net due to cleaning and handling is also a concern. Several of reported incidents related to fish escape happens while handling of fish – for example crowding due to de-licing or transfer. Equipment contributing to these operations needs to be specially attended to.
In addition to arrangement representing physical barriers preventing the fish to escape, all other systems and components that may cause fish escape if they fail or malfunction in any way need to be certified.
The four different items listed above, asset integrity, personnel safety, fish welfare and fish control, are considered equally important for safe and sustainable fish farming offshore. These elements are also closely interconnected where integrity of one may support several others.
CONCLUSION
There is a significant potential to utilize competence from traditional offshore and maritime industry to help operators of exposed fish farming units to identify operational risks by applying technical rules and requirements from traditional maritime execution model.
Combining the well-known certification concept from maritime industry with balanced aquaculture-based requirements for fish welfare and biodiversity provides a robust and cost-efficient solutions to reducing risk in operation of ocean fish farming installations.