Environmentalists are increasingly sounding the alarm over what they claim are destructive impacts of the global fish farming industry, but government hesitance in imposing stricter regulations is seen as an illustration of the challenge ahead in meeting biodiversity targets.
Farmed fish accounts for a rising share of total fish production, with producers in countries like Norway, Chile, and Canada gaining economic significance and influence.
In Norway, which accounts for 46% of Europe’s total aquaculture production, the total value of slaughtered fish in 2022 reached $9.8 billion, up from just $795 million in 1998. More than 1.6 mln tonnes of farmed fish was produced in 2022, and is growing quickly.
The rapid growth means the industry is continuously looking for additional locations along the coast and in fjords to establish new farms, and is mostly granted permission by the government, even within Norway’s limited number of marine protected areas (MPAs).
That is despite environmental groups say the farms are causing serious damage to the country’s marine environment and dwindling marine biodiversity.
“During meetings at the parliament in which we attended, where the different interest groups say what they think about ocean protection, there are mainly two groups that are sceptical about more ocean protection: the aquaculture and the oil industries,” Per-Erik Schulze, a marine ecologist with the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature, told Carbon Pulse.
“Even the fishing industry now uses marine protected areas as a tool for conservation purposes. Instead, the aquaculture industry resists because it wants to access even more areas than they have today.”
Along with other organisations and NGOs, the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature is trying to push back against the industry by asking the government for more aquaculture-free zones.
Earlier this year, the group signed a petition addressed to Norway’s minister of fisheries and oceans, Cecilie Myrseth, demanding that the number of farmed fish in open cages be reduced along the entire coast, and land-based facilities are restricted to so-called grey areas, such as already existing industrial sites.
“Norway claims that 44% of [its] ocean is kind of protected through fishery measures, which is absurd,” Schulze said, adding that, when it comes to the 30×30 targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework, the country is lagging far behind in finding areas to be designated as protected.
Moreover, as in many other European countries, bottom trawling is allowed in Norwegian MPAs.
“If you want to make a properly protected area, you can’t have industrial fishing or bottom trawling happening inside those zones,” Schulze said.
Speaking to Carbon Pulse, Henrik Wiedswang Horjen, spokesperson for the Norwegian Seafood Federation, said there are aquaculture facilities within protected areas in the country.
Nevertheless, Horjen added that the issue is that the areas remain ‘protected’ after the permits have been granted.
“In these cases, the actors have limited opportunities for growth and development, in order to avoid deterioration of the conservation purpose,” he said.
“In most cases, aquaculture operations will not have a negative impact, and in these cases there is an opening to combine use and protection.”
HARMFUL TO NATURE
Under the Aquaculture Act, the Norwegian government requires the national salmon farming industry to take environmental, economic, and social conditions into account.
However, two main problems related to open net farming still persist, according to ecologist Schulze.
The first is so-called eutrophication, the gradual increase in the concentration of phosphorus, nitrogen, and other plant nutrients that may result in the loss of ecosystem services.
“Fish farming is responsible for the larger amount of discharges of nitrogen and phosphorus in the sea, and our fjord system is under incredible pressure,” Schultze said.
The second is the impact of aquaculture on the wild fish population.
“Wild salmon and wild sea trout in many of our rivers have been destroyed by diseases and sea lice coming from aquaculture settlements,” he added.
The Norwegian salmon industry has especially been under the spotlight due to the high rate of salmon mortality documented.
Last year, a record figure of almost 63 mln salmon died prematurely in the large sea pens along the fjords of the country.
A recent study released by environmental organisation Feedback EU and a coalition of West African and Norwegian organisations found that every year nearly 2 mln tonnes of wild fish are extracted from the ocean to feed Norwegian farmed salmon.
According to the organisation Oceana Europe, the North Sea is one of the busiest and most heavily impacted marine areas in the world, and the greatest human impacts are overfishing, bottom trawling, and eutrophication.
Overall, as the Water Information System for Europe (WISE) has pointed out, ecosystems are still under pressure from human activities across all of Europe’s seas.
A high proportion of marine species and habitats continues to be in “unfavourable conservation status”, the WISE website says, against the requirements of the EU Habitats Directive.
The EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive’s objective of “achieving good environmental” status in all EU marine waters by 2020 has not been achieved in relation to marine biodiversity, the organisation said.
SCOTLAND
Alongside Norway, another country extensively relying on aquaculture production is Scotland, where the industry generates approximately £885 mln ($1 bln) of gross value added.
According to data from UK-based charity WildFish, Scotland produces around 200,000 tonnes of farmed salmon a year – 180,000 in 2023.
There are around 200 open net farms in the country along the west coast and the islands, regarded as drivers of marine environment pollution.
“There’s a massive use of toxic chemicals on the farms that are known to be dangerous to other crustaceans and can spread to around 30 kilometres from the farms,” Rachel Mulrenan, director at WildFish Scotland, told Carbon Pulse.
“Everything that goes into the pen flows out of the pen straight into the water body.”
The organisation has observed a 25% mortality rate among farmed salmons in Scotland.
“We witnessed more than 17 mln farmed salmon dead last year,” she added, identifying sea lice parasites as one of the threats, weakening the fish either directly or via treatments, and leaving them more susceptible to diseases.
As per the Norwegian Seafood Federation, questions about the sustainability of the industry must be addressed by national authorities and the Ministry of the Environment, since they are responsible for issuing the licences.
When it comes to eutrophication, Horjen claimed that in Norway, “surveys of sea floor conditions over many years show that the condition in approximately 95% of cases is either good or very good”.
“If the impact is above the tolerance limit, the company must either vacate or move the site,” he said.
“At the vast majority of hatcheries, the residual raw material is collected, and at the older hatcheries we are busy implementing a set of regulations that provide equal requirements between old and new facilities.”
CERTIFIED FAILURE
According to WildFish’s Mulrenan, death rates are even higher in some of the farms certified by the Best Aquaculture Practice (BAP), the world’s largest aquaculture certification group along with the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC).
“Gravir and Plocrapol are two Bakkafrost-owned salmon farms that are certified by BAP,” she said, with Gravir registering an overall mortality of 42.3% in its last full production cycle, and Plocrapol 56.2%. Bakkafrost is registered in the Faroe Islands.
“In other words, more than one in every two fish died on the farm across the production cycle lasting 18-24 months, and yet the farm remained certified as ‘responsibly produced’ by BAP.”
WildFish was among 76 organisations that on May 5 penned an open letter to the Global Seafood Alliance’s (GSA) CEO Mike Kocsis, urging him to reveal evidence of environmental damage associated with BAP salmon farms.
According to the letter, the BAP standard still has “no meaningful metric limits or performance expectations for certified farms on critical environmental impacts such as sea lice, disease, parasiticides, antibiotics, dissolved oxygen, and endangered, threatened and protected species”.
The organisations accused the standard of lacking strict stocking density and water quality monitoring requirements – leading to poor health and welfare outcomes for the farmed salmon.
Kelly Roebuck, sustainable seafood campaigner for Canada-based organisation Living Oceans Society, told Carbon Pulse that in Europe the majority of farmed salmon comes from ASC certified farms, while the BAP certification has its stronghold in North America.
“Those certifications have gained so much traction within the corporate world that it is now time to call them out for the greenwashing and to really expose their limitations,” she said.
Examples of environmental damage were found in all major salmon farming regions, including the US, Norway, Chile, Canada, Scotland, and Australia.
LOBBYING
While both Scotland and Norway have struggled to ensure that aquaculture farms live up to sustainability criteria, governments are not actively opposing the practice, Schulze and Mulrenan said.
That is despite both countries profiling themselves as champions of the Global Biodiversity Framework and its ambition.
“Although two inquiries in 2016 concluded that the industry should not continue to expand due to its environmental impact, the Scottish government fully supports the growth of the industry,” Mulrenan said.
According to Randi Storhaug, deputy chair of the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature, one of the main reasons why aquaculture is often considered sustainable is the power of the industry.
“I think that our seafood organisations in Norway are very good lobbyists. They have a lot of money and can play much better than us with politicians,” she said.
According to Schulze, the Norwegian industry is claiming that in the near future, it will be possible to leverage natural cleaning techniques, employing mussels and shells as filtering organisms on farms to clean both carbon and polluting nutrients.
Horjen from the Norwegian Seafood Federation told Carbon Pulse the industry is aware of suitable technologies for the collection of residual raw materials where the water flow is not as strong, as in the case of threshold fjords. Furthermore, Horjen said the industry is also working on new solutions to address the sea lice issue.
However, Schulze said he was not aware of any facilities in Norway where the cleaning techniques referred to by Storhaug are applied.
“If we create a completely new system involving that kind of cleaning techniques, it will surely be interesting,” Schultze said.
“But in Norway, at the moment, there’s nothing like that. To date, they are working against nature.”
A SUSTAINABLE PATH?
Conservationists from Norwegian, Scottish, and Canadian organisations agreed that a distinction must be made between agriculture involving predominantly salmon, and a more extensive one involving, for instance, seaweeds, shellfish, and bivalves.
“When it comes to aquaculture, you can have some of the most sustainable food options out there, like shellfish and seaweed, and unsustainable products such as salmon farming and open pens,” Roebuck said.
She underlined that many of the groups who signed the open letter to the GSA support sustainable aquaculture.
“I don’t reckon aquaculture is bad in itself since it is an alternative to all the shipping and flying activities involved in the big market,” Storhaug said.
The Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature is also working on a research project to tackle the environmental threats in the industry with two of the biggest aquaculture companies in the country, though it preferred not to disclose their names.
“I think that there is definitely a role for sustainable aquaculture, but, unfortunately, particularly in the UK, salmon farming and aquaculture are used interchangeably,” WildFish’s Mulrenan added.
Furthermore, close-net facilities built on land are often considered an alternative that is less harmful to the environment. But this does not always appear to be true, she said.
“My understanding is there are lots of different types of closed containment farms, and some discharge their water into the water body anyway,” Mulrenan said.
In light of that, WildFish prefers to campaign for the closure of open-net facilities rather than for the opening of close-net ones.
Calls for enhancing the sustainability of the aquaculture industry are not limited to Norway and Scotland, and have recently also touched Chile, Canada, and Iceland.
As much as 70% of global salmon is farmed, and the salmon aquaculture industry is currently the fastest growing food production system in the world, according to WWF.
By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com
*** Click here to sign up to our twice-weekly biodiversity newsletter ***
