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

Aquaculture is an location that could have important financial benefit to Europe. The EU recognises the sector’s benefit in its Blue Progress tactic which seeks to harness the untapped possible of the marine and maritime sectors for food production and employment although concentrating on environmental sustainability.

Even so, a absence of economical and helpful licensing and regulation is hampering the aquaculture sector’s advancement. This condition is primary to skipped opportunities for the production of seafood, a lot of which is currently imported. It also signifies that European producers are dropping out on export opportunities. In excess of the several years, fish farming has also experienced its good share of terrible press owing to weak techniques blamed for, between some others, disorder in fish shares and air pollution of the natural environment.

The EU-funded TAPAS job aims to change this by providing federal government regulators and policymakers the details and instruments they have to have to create sturdy, far more economical regulatory frameworks that can direct to the sector’s advancement and sustainable advancement. Project exploration embraced both equally the marine and freshwater environments.

‘We structured TAPAS to make many crucial outputs, which includes coverage suggestions, predictive environmental designs and an aquaculture toolbox for choice-makers,’ suggests Trevor Telfer, job coordinator from the College of Stirling, United Kingdom. ‘These results are progressive in just the job with each and every creating from the other.’

Steering on licensing

The job commenced with a evaluate of present laws and licensing techniques for aquaculture throughout Europe, which included important consultation with stakeholders. This led to the drafting of coverage and licensing suggestions as well as guidance for governance covering all levels of the marketplace, from get started-ups to well-proven providers. The suggestions will be used mostly by federal government regulators billed with employing economical licensing procedures.

TAPAS went on to build predictive environmental designs and automatic monitoring and info-recording programs centered on exploration throughout Europe’s aquaculture sector. These improvements have been made to enable put into practice the project’s coverage and licensing suggestions and will be of benefit to regulators as well as experts and marketplace bodies.

The designs and monitoring programs protect present lower-tech and substantial-tech aquaculture production programs. They could also enable in the introduction of new programs that could have distinct regulatory specifications, this sort of as built-in multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA). In IMTA, by-goods this sort of as waste from 1 species are used as fertiliser or food for a different.

Much better impression

The project’s aquaculture toolbox presents a world wide web-centered choice-guidance framework which can support in the advancement of significantly less highly-priced, far more transparent and economical licensing of aquaculture in Europe.

‘The toolbox makes use of related modelling and guidance outputs from the TAPAS job, but also presents links and guidance to permit use of related results from other EU tasks and sources,’ clarifies Telfer. ‘The availability of the toolbox, its intuitive design and details will permit a much better knowing of aquaculture regulation although also aiding to improve the community perception of European aquaculture.’

The TAPAS team is also endeavor coaching, dissemination and outreach activities with the aim of increasing the impression of European aquaculture and the uptake of the job outcomes by regulators.