Aquaculture and Biodiversity to 2050

In an article in our series on the seas and oceans published in May 2021, Sébastien Abis and Cyrille Coutansais shone a spotlight on the French aquaculture sector, stressing both the challenges that confronted it in the context of trade globalization and also the advantages it presented for boosting the French agricultural sector and improving the country’s food security. To complete this series, Philippe Goulletquer and Denis Lacroix now expand the analysis of aquaculture to the global level. They stress the extent to which the sector faces a range of challenges, among them a rising demand for seafood products in response to demographic growth, a global biodiversity crisis and planet-wide changes that include the effects of climate disruption. At the same time, it does not seem that we are currently on course to meet the international biodiversity objectives we have set ourselves: wide-ranging changes are needed in many sectors of production to achieve this. And the Covid crisis has revealed the low resilience of globalized production systems and shown why it might be advantageous to repatriate some production. Though aquaculture still has important environmental problems to resolve before it is sustainable, it has some competitive advantages by comparison with other animal products that ought to enable it to confront the food security challenge in the period to 2050. The authors propose various scenarios here, including an increase, on a trend basis, of 44% in global aquaculture production. All these scenarios will require political choices — given that conservation and sustainable-farming approaches can rarely be fully reconciled — and the public will need to be provided with honest information, while biodiversity is prioritized as both a universal common good and a source of future solutions.