Journal of Aquaculture Research & Development

Evaluation of aquaculture system sustainability: A methodology and comparative approaches

International Conference on Aquaculture & Fisheries

July 20-22, 2015 Brisbane, Australia

Jérôme Lazard

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Aquac Res Development

Abstract:

Very little work dealing with the evaluation of aquaculture system sustainability has been undertaken to date on a global and comparative basis. Moreover, the analysis of the main reference frameworks such as codes of conduct, guides of good practice, standards, labels and of initiatives for the construction of sustainable development indicators in aquaculture, show that most of them are based on very unbalanced approaches concerning the dimensions of sustainable development that are taken into account. The approach taken up here is instead designed to cover all the dimensions of sustainability including the traditional pillars (economic, social and environmental) as well as the institutional one (governance). This latter, in particular, gives these approaches its original and innovative nature as well as the role played by aquaculture as a development factor for the sustainability at the territory level. At once multidisciplinary and participatory (co-construction of sustainability indicators), the approach compares several worldwide countries with highly differentiated types of aquaculture system. An original output from this work states that the classification of areas with respect to sustainability obtained from the multicriteria evaluation corresponds, in terms of relative priority, to the classification obtained from the results of the life cycle assessment. Hence, in both cases, the technical model based on intensive farming obtains the best scores whilst more extensive systems, which might have been thought to be closer to natural systems in their environmental dimension and therefore intuitively more ?sustainable?, score much lower.