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

© Trevor Telfer, 2009

Aquaculture is an space that could have considerable financial price to Europe. The EU recognises the sector’s price in its Blue Development system which seeks to harness the untapped likely of the maritime and maritime sectors for meals production and positions even though concentrating on environmental sustainability.

Nevertheless, a lack of successful and powerful licensing and regulation is hampering the aquaculture sector’s advancement. This condition is main to skipped prospects for the production of seafood, significantly of which is at the moment imported. It also means that European producers are dropping out on export prospects. In excess of the decades, fish farming has also experienced its truthful share of terrible press because of to bad procedures blamed for, among other people, disease in fish shares and pollution of the natural environment.

The EU-funded TAPAS job aims to adjust this by supplying governing administration regulators and policymakers the facts and applications they require to create sturdy, additional successful regulatory frameworks that can direct to the sector’s advancement and sustainable advancement. Undertaking analysis embraced equally the maritime and freshwater environments.

‘We structured TAPAS to create quite a few crucial outputs, which include policy recommendations, predictive environmental models and an aquaculture toolbox for decision-makers,’ claims Trevor Telfer, job coordinator from the University of Stirling, United Kingdom. ‘These results are progressive in the job with each and every constructing from the other.’

Steering on licensing

The job began with a overview of present laws and licensing procedures for aquaculture across Europe, which associated considerable consultation with stakeholders. This led to the drafting of policy and licensing recommendations as properly as assistance for governance masking all degrees of the marketplace, from start off-ups to properly-proven corporations. The recommendations will be made use of principally by governing administration regulators charged with employing successful licensing policies.

TAPAS went on to build predictive environmental models and automatic monitoring and info-recording programs based mostly on analysis across Europe’s aquaculture sector. These innovations have been developed to assist put into action the project’s policy and licensing recommendations and will be of price to regulators as properly as researchers and marketplace bodies.

The models and monitoring programs include current low-tech and superior-tech aquaculture production programs. They could also assist in the introduction of new programs that may have different regulatory needs, these as built-in multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA). In IMTA, by-products these as waste from one particular species are made use of as fertiliser or meals for one more.

Better picture

The project’s aquaculture toolbox provides a web-based mostly decision-help framework which can help in the advancement of considerably less high-priced, additional clear and successful licensing of aquaculture in Europe.

‘The toolbox makes use of applicable modelling and assistance outputs from the TAPAS job, but also provides links and assistance to empower use of applicable results from other EU projects and sources,’ clarifies Telfer. ‘The availability of the toolbox, its intuitive layout and facts will empower a far better being familiar with of aquaculture regulation even though also aiding to make improvements to the public perception of European aquaculture.’

The TAPAS team is also endeavor instruction, dissemination and outreach things to do with the goal of improving upon the picture of European aquaculture and the uptake of the job final results by regulators.