3/3 Oceans and Land: The Environmental Equation of Aquaculture

As the devastating environmental footprint of conventional terrestrial agriculture becomes increasingly clear (explored in article 2/3 Beyond the Plate: The Hidden Land Costs of Our Food System), many look towards our oceans and waterways for solutions. With widespread overfishing pushing many wild fish stocks towards collapse, aquaculture, or fish farming, has surged, rapidly becoming the primary source of seafood for human consumption. Poised to supply the majority shortly, it represents the fastest-growing food production sector globally. This is driven by its theoretical advantages as a potentially more resource-efficient protein source capable of alleviating terrestrial pressures and contributing to climate and biodiversity goals. This rapid growth and potential have spurred significant interest from organizations worldwide in ensuring that their development aligns with sustainable principles.

Recognizing this immense global potential of aquaculture within the broader food system, Organigogo approaches its current trajectory fully recognizing the challenges and opportunities inherent in building a truly sustainable food future for all. Our aim is not a detached observation, but rather one informed by this perspective. However, to ensure this potential is realized responsibly, we must critically examine the current trajectory of aquaculture.

Therefore, a crucial question arises: Does this rapid expansion chart a course toward genuine sustainability, or are we inadvertently trading one set of ecological crises for another? Are we truly addressing the fundamental challenge of sustainably meeting rising global food demand with less resource-intensive diets, or are we merely shifting its manifestations from stressed terrestrial systems to vulnerable aquatic ones, potentially deepening the interconnected, damaging cycles inherent in our current global food system? It's crucial to understand that posing this question is not intended as a challenge to the hard work and potential of the aquaculture sector. Instead, it's a vital warning, offered with the sincere desire to see our industry evolve in a more sustainable and ecologically sound manner.

While holding promise, the way many current intensive aquaculture operations are conducted risks significant environmental harm, exhibiting inefficiencies similar to those that cause problems in some land-based agricultural models.

The physical expansion of aquaculture facilities, particularly when intensified without sufficient ecological consideration, can lead to the destruction of vital coastal habitats like mangrove forests – crucial ecosystems for biodiversity, coastal protection, and carbon storage.

Furthermore, inefficiencies in intensive operations often result in the discharge of excess nutrients (from feed and waste) and potentially chemical residues into surrounding waters.

This pollution degrades water quality and directly harms local marine life. Critically, the excess nutrients fuel eutrophication, leading to massive algal blooms.

When these blooms die and sink, marine bacteria feed on the decaying organic matter, consuming vast amounts of dissolved oxygen in the process.

The result is the creation of hypoxic 'dead zones' where oxygen levels plummet. These zones suffocate most marine life, specifically asphyxiating bottom-dwelling organisms like clams and worms, and severely disrupting fish populations that depend on these ecosystems.

Continuing to scale aquaculture without fundamentally addressing these operational challenges risks entrenching practices that further compromise the health of our aquatic ecosystems.

Perhaps the most critical challenge lies in sustainably feeding this burgeoning industry, revealing a complex web linking aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in potentially unsustainable ways that directly connect back to the core unsustainable trajectory of our global food system.

A significant portion of conventional aquaculture, especially for carnivorous species, relies on fishmeal and fish oil derived from wild-caught fish, often small pelagic species. This creates a difficult cycle: aiming to reduce pressure on some wild stocks by farming fish, while simultaneously increasing pressure on other wild populations needed solely for feed.

Feed composition data often relies on voluntary industry disclosures, which can be difficult to validate and may contain uncertainties or underreporting.

The mortality of wild fish due to "slipping" (releasing unwanted catch from nets) and bycatch in fisheries supplying trimmings has been largely ignored in FI:FO calculations.

As a direct consequence of this reliance on fishmeal and fish oil, this practice can contribute to overfishing, impact marine food webs, and sometimes involve destructive fishing methods like bottom trawling, which damages seabed habitats and releases significant amounts of stored carbon.

Further compounding these environmental concerns, a lack of robust traceability in many FMFO supply chains further complicates efforts, making it difficult to ensure these ingredients don't originate from unsustainable or illegal fisheries.

To reduce reliance on Fishmeal & Fish Oil (FMFO), the industry increasingly incorporates plant-based ingredients like soy or palm oil derivatives. However, this seemingly positive shift can inadvertently transfer environmental pressures from the oceans back to the land, potentially exacerbating the very problems detailed in Article 2/3 Beyond the Plate: The Hidden Land Costs of Our Food System.

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FI: FO alone is not a comprehensive measure of aquaculture feed sustainability, as it doesn't include the environmental impacts of terrestrial feed production.

Sourcing these agricultural commodities, if not done through ecologically verified and sustainable methods, can drive demand, contributing to deforestation, habitat conversion, land degradation, water depletion, and biodiversity loss.

The complexity of global agricultural supply chains often contributes to traceability challenges that persist here too, making it hard to guarantee the ecological integrity of plant-based feed components. This effectively exports the environmental challenges of intensive terrestrial agriculture directly into the aquaculture supply, demonstrating how attempts to solve one aspect of the feed dilemma can inadvertently deepen other facets of the core challenge of unsustainable global food production, reinforcing the damaging interdependence between land and sea.

This intricate and often opaque web of feed sourcing, driven by economic structures that often externalize true costs and by consumption patterns seeking affordability without full visibility, highlights a critical juncture. It’s a point where the informed participation of all stakeholders—consumers questioning origins, investors demanding sustainable sourcing, policymakers incentivizing transparent supply chains, and producers innovating with ecological inputs—can begin to exert collective influence to break these damaging cycles and demand a truly sustainable 'equation' for aquaculture feed.

This interconnected feed dilemma highlights a critical vulnerability. Within many current mainstream practices, neither heavy reliance on wild-caught fish nor the potentially problematic sourcing of land-based crops offers a straightforward, sustainable solution. The challenge of feeding farmed fish inextricably ties the health of our oceans to the health of our land.

The consequences of scaling up aquaculture under these prevailing conditions extend beyond simply replacing one set of environmental problems with another. By directly damaging aquatic ecosystems and indirectly impacting terrestrial ecosystems through feed production, we are significantly undermining the planet's natural ability to regulate climate and directly exacerbating critical global crises such as the degradation of natural carbon sinks, the acceleration of climate change, widespread biodiversity loss, and the long-term threat to food security.

This damage manifests in two critical ways: first, by diminishing the collective capacity of these ecosystems to function as vital carbon sinks, reducing the amount of atmospheric CO2 that is naturally absorbed and stored. Second, and perhaps more alarmingly, the destruction of ecosystems like forests, mangroves, and wetlands can lead to the release of substantial amounts of already stored greenhouse gases, including CO2 and methane, directly into the atmosphere.

To elaborate on the critical climate impacts associated with many current practices in aquaculture, highlighting the direct and indirect effects on both terrestrial and the interconnected freshwater and marine ecosystems:

It's important to note that whether individual producers are fully aware of the origins of their inputs or the broader environmental consequences of certain practices doesn't negate the fact that these impacts are indeed occurring. The interconnectedness of global supply chains and ecological systems means that even seemingly localized operations can contribute to wider environmental problems.

Healthy terrestrial ecosystems, like forests and wetlands, and healthy aquatic (marine) ecosystems, like mangroves and the ocean through phytoplankton and seagrass beds, naturally absorb significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and other biological processes.

When these ecosystems are degraded or destroyed directly (e.g., mangrove deforestation for aquaculture ponds, damage to seagrass beds from pollution) or indirectly (e.g., deforestation for feed crops impacting terrestrial carbon sinks), their ability to absorb and store atmospheric CO2 is significantly reduced. This means less CO2 is being removed from the atmosphere, contributing to the ongoing accumulation of greenhouse gases and the destabilization of the climate.

Beyond reducing absorption, the destruction of certain ecosystems can directly release significant amounts of stored greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Damaging ecosystems not only affects their current ability to absorb and store CO2 but also impairs their future capacity to do so. Destroying a mature forest eliminates its long-term carbon sequestration potential. Polluting oceans can harm the health and abundance of phytoplankton, which play a crucial role in oceanic carbon uptake.

Given these significant and interconnected environmental consequences, isn't it crucial for the aquaculture industry, including our own practices, to be critically examined? And, extending beyond the industry itself, isn't it equally crucial for us, as consumers choosing our seafood, producers adopting responsible methods, community members concerned about local waters, citizens calling for responsible oversight, investors funding food production, and policymakers shaping regulations, to recognize our potential collective influence? Our informed engagement is vital in demanding and actively supporting aquaculture practices that genuinely break this damaging cycle and contribute positively to planetary health.

Considering these interconnected impacts, and echoing the challenges consumers face in discerning truly sustainable options (as explored in 1/3 Healthy Choices, Hidden Costs: Why Consumers Struggle for Truly Sustainable Food), a crucial question arises for the industry today: Is the aquaculture industry—including the companies and systems we choose to support—genuinely taking steps to avoid these harms, or transitioning towards ecological practices that consumers can trust, rather than simply shifting the burden elsewhere?

This question, vital for the industry's credibility and long-term viability, cannot be resolved in isolation. It necessitates the informed and active participation of all stakeholders—from individuals making purchasing decisions and producers implementing best practices, to policymakers setting standards—to collaboratively shape and demand a more responsible and transparent path forward for aquaculture.

Continuing this line of thought regarding the long-term effects of environmental damage, furthermore, the degradation of these vital areas reduces their future potential to capture and store both existing and future greenhouse gas emissions, exacerbating climate change and placing additional stress on all food production systems, ultimately jeopardizing future food security and ecological stability.

Therefore, simply intensifying current aquaculture without ecological guidance is not a viable path forward. To avoid this dangerous trajectory, a genuine solution requires a paradigm shift—the future depends on a gradual increase in ecological and regenerative production, which remains negligible on a global scale, one that moves decisively beyond mere damage minimization toward truly sustainable and verifiable aquaculture.

These must be systems designed holistically, aiming to actively restore ecosystem health, enhance biodiversity, and contribute positively to climate resilience, rather than degrading these essential functions.

Crucially, realizing this vision demands cutting through the noise of ambiguous adjectives or labels and unsubstantiated claims prevalent today – the very issues that make it so difficult for consumers to find truly sustainable options, as we explored in our first article 1/3 Healthy Choices, Hidden Costs: Why Consumers Struggle for Truly Sustainable Food. We need radical transparency and verifiable proof of ecological performance.

This means implementing robust traceability systems from source to consumer and relying on clear, science-based metrics that are subject to rigorous, independent, third-party auditing.

Only through such verifiable accountability can we effectively combat greenwashing, ensure that 'sustainable' claims translate into tangible ecological benefits, and build the genuine trust needed across the entire value chain – from producers to consumers and investors.

This is where recognizing our collective power as informed participants becomes paramount. When we, at all levels—from citizens demanding clear and honest labeling, to producers embracing verifiable practices, to investors strategically funding transparent initiatives, and to policymakers creating robust and equitable frameworks for accountability—acknowledge that our decisions and actions carry collective weight, we begin to exercise our relational agency. This collective agency is what will drive the co-creation and widespread adoption of these trustworthy, verifiable systems for ecological aquaculture.

Furthermore, these mechanisms for verification must be designed inclusively, in line with the UN's "Leave no one behind" (LNOB) commitment to end poverty, reduce inequality, and end discrimination. This includes ensuring that the rights, perspectives, and traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples are actively incorporated. Unlike some current certification landscapes that, due to high costs and complexity, can inadvertently create barriers for small and medium-sized producers and Indigenous communities, who are often crucial innovators and stewards of biodiversity, systems must be accessible, leaving no one behind.

This ensures the widespread adoption of practices that truly align aquaculture with our critical global climate and biodiversity goals, like those outlined in the Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) aiming to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 through various targets, including the conservation of 30% of land and oceans, ultimately leading to a more equitable and ecologically sustainable industry.

Building upon this foundation of verifiable accountability, we can ensure that aquaculture moves beyond its current paradoxes and fully contributes to a truly ecologically sustainable and resilient food future for all.

Thus, the interconnected cycle of our current global food challenge becomes starkly clear: the pressures of a growing population and changing dietary habits strain terrestrial systems; limits in wild-capture fisheries push humanity towards aquaculture as a primary protein source; yet, industrialized intensive aquaculture, through its reliance on feed inputs that are often untraceable and potentially unsustainably sourced, derived from both sea and land, frequently fails to break this cycle of resource depletion and ecosystem degradation.

Instead, it too often becomes another vector through which the core issues of our global food system are perpetuated, leading directly to critical consequences like accelerated climate change, significant biodiversity loss, damage to vital natural carbon sinks, and profound threats to our long-term food security.

Without a fundamental shift towards ecological guidance rooted in verifiable transparency across all these interconnected systems, aquaculture risks amplifying these global crises rather than contributing to their solution.

This is not a predicament to be passively observed; it is a challenge that calls for a profound recognition of our shared responsibility. It necessitates the collective power of informed participants—consumers making discerning choices, producers innovating with ecological solutions, communities advocating for local ecosystem health, citizens demanding stronger environmental governance, investors prioritizing long-term ecological value, and policymakers forging supportive regulations—to proactively demand and co-create aquaculture systems that prioritize planetary health alongside human needs, transforming this sector into a true force for global regeneration.

At Organigogo, we recognize that building a truly sustainable food system is a complex undertaking—one that demands collective action. Our exploration of environmental issues within aquaculture is not about casting blame from the sidelines. Instead, we approach this work as active participants in a shared journey, committed to addressing challenges and identifying solutions that lead to meaningful environmental improvement.

In light of the urgent need for action, we are dedicated to fostering collaboration, sharing practical insights, and engaging with all stakeholders who are working toward measurable, lasting sustainability in aquaculture. We believe that by each of us acknowledging our potential influence and exercising our relational agency (our collective ability to influence change together) —whether as producers adopting better methods, consumers demanding transparent products, investors supporting ethical ventures, or citizens advocating for sound policies—we can collectively move beyond the current damaging cycles and co-create a more hopeful future.

It is through embracing transparency, auditable accountability, and collaborative innovation that the aquaculture industry can truly fulfill its potential as a vital and ecologically sound source of food for a growing world.

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