Driving sustainable growth in European aquaculture – Information Centre – Research & Innovation

A crew of EU-funded scientists from 10 nations around the world has developed new suggestions, styles and tools for the sustainable development of European aquaculture. The project’s effects will be employed to notify decisions about potential restrictions and licensing.


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© Trevor Telfer, 2009

Aquaculture is an space that could have sizeable financial worth to Europe. The EU recognises the sector’s worth in its Blue Advancement approach which seeks to harness the untapped prospective of the marine and maritime sectors for meals manufacturing and careers even though focusing on environmental sustainability.

Nevertheless, a deficiency of successful and effective licensing and regulation is hampering the aquaculture sector’s improvement. This problem is primary to skipped chances for the manufacturing of seafood, much of which is presently imported. It also means that European producers are shedding out on export chances. In excess of the years, fish farming has also had its good share of undesirable push owing to inadequate tactics blamed for, among other folks, ailment in fish shares and pollution of the natural environment.

The EU-funded TAPAS venture aims to alter this by giving government regulators and policymakers the information and facts and tools they have to have to build sturdy, far more successful regulatory frameworks that can guide to the sector’s development and sustainable improvement. Venture research embraced each the marine and freshwater environments.

‘We structured TAPAS to develop various vital outputs, which includes coverage suggestions, predictive environmental styles and an aquaculture toolbox for selection-makers,’ suggests Trevor Telfer, venture coordinator from the University of Stirling, United Kingdom. ‘These results are progressive within just the venture with each making from the other.’

Guidance on licensing

The venture commenced with a review of recent laws and licensing tactics for aquaculture throughout Europe, which concerned sizeable consultation with stakeholders. This led to the drafting of coverage and licensing suggestions as effectively as assistance for governance covering all degrees of the market, from begin-ups to effectively-set up companies. The suggestions will be employed principally by government regulators billed with implementing successful licensing rules.

TAPAS went on to develop predictive environmental styles and automatic monitoring and information-recording techniques dependent on research throughout Europe’s aquaculture sector. These innovations have been designed to help put into practice the project’s coverage and licensing suggestions and will be of worth to regulators as effectively as researchers and market bodies.

The styles and monitoring techniques address present lower-tech and high-tech aquaculture manufacturing techniques. They could also help in the introduction of new techniques that may have unique regulatory specifications, these as built-in multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA). In IMTA, by-products and solutions these as waste from a single species are employed as fertiliser or meals for an additional.

Improved picture

The project’s aquaculture toolbox provides a web-dependent selection-aid framework which can aid in the improvement of considerably less high-priced, far more transparent and successful licensing of aquaculture in Europe.

‘The toolbox makes use of pertinent modelling and assistance outputs from the TAPAS venture, but also provides one-way links and assistance to enable use of pertinent results from other EU tasks and resources,’ describes Telfer. ‘The availability of the toolbox, its intuitive style and information and facts will enable a improved being familiar with of aquaculture regulation even though also helping to strengthen the community perception of European aquaculture.’

The TAPAS crew is also enterprise education, dissemination and outreach functions with the intention of strengthening the picture of European aquaculture and the uptake of the venture effects by regulators.