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

© Trevor Telfer, 2009

Aquaculture is an spot that could have considerable economic price to Europe. The EU recognises the sector’s price in its Blue Progress approach which seeks to harness the untapped opportunity of the maritime and maritime sectors for food items manufacturing and careers whilst concentrating on environmental sustainability.

Nevertheless, a lack of effective and successful licensing and regulation is hampering the aquaculture sector’s enhancement. This circumstance is primary to skipped options for the manufacturing of seafood, a lot of which is currently imported. It also means that European producers are losing out on export options. More than the many years, fish farming has also experienced its fair share of poor push owing to inadequate practices blamed for, amongst others, ailment in fish shares and air pollution of the atmosphere.

The EU-funded TAPAS challenge aims to change this by giving federal government regulators and policymakers the information and facts and tools they want to create strong, much more effective regulatory frameworks that can lead to the sector’s expansion and sustainable enhancement. Venture research embraced the two the maritime and freshwater environments.

‘We structured TAPAS to produce a number of essential outputs, which includes policy recommendations, predictive environmental models and an aquaculture toolbox for determination-makers,’ claims Trevor Telfer, challenge coordinator from the University of Stirling, United Kingdom. ‘These outcomes are progressive inside the challenge with just about every constructing from the other.’

Direction on licensing

The challenge started with a critique of recent legislation and licensing practices for aquaculture throughout Europe, which included considerable session with stakeholders. This led to the drafting of policy and licensing recommendations as well as guidance for governance masking all ranges of the marketplace, from begin-ups to well-set up companies. The recommendations will be employed generally by federal government regulators billed with implementing effective licensing principles.

TAPAS went on to acquire predictive environmental models and automatic monitoring and facts-recording programs centered on research throughout Europe’s aquaculture sector. These innovations have been created to help employ the project’s policy and licensing recommendations and will be of price to regulators as well as researchers and marketplace bodies.

The models and monitoring programs deal with current very low-tech and large-tech aquaculture manufacturing programs. They could also help in the introduction of new programs that may possibly have unique regulatory demands, this kind of as integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA). In IMTA, by-goods this kind of as waste from 1 species are employed as fertiliser or food items for another.

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The project’s aquaculture toolbox offers a world wide web-centered determination-guidance framework which can assist in the enhancement of significantly less high priced, much more clear and effective licensing of aquaculture in Europe.

‘The toolbox makes use of applicable modelling and guidance outputs from the TAPAS challenge, but also offers inbound links and guidance to enable use of applicable outcomes from other EU jobs and resources,’ describes Telfer. ‘The availability of the toolbox, its intuitive style and information and facts will enable a much better understanding of aquaculture regulation whilst also encouraging to boost the general public notion of European aquaculture.’

The TAPAS crew is also undertaking education, dissemination and outreach functions with the aim of enhancing the graphic of European aquaculture and the uptake of the challenge outcomes by regulators.