Future aquaculture challenges and innovation

The GOAL aquaculture conference here in China has just finished for this year. It has once again been an opportunity to learn and share ideas and information with a wide range of people from every sector and corner of the globe.

Some big issues were presented and discussed such as how the seafood industry tackles the complex and diverse challenge of ensuring robust social standards in the supply chain to how to mitigate for disease outbreaks.

It was my opportunity to speak today, I joined other panel members to talk about the role of innovation in aquaculture, what has been achieved and what are the pressing challenges. To my mind the most pressing challenge is ensuring the health and diversity of our marine and freshwater environments if they are to cope with the burgeoning growth of global aquaculture. We can only achieve this if we implement a robust planning process that has ecosystem health at its heart and environmental carrying capacity rather that economic capacity defines the boundaries.

Innovation in aquaculture panel session

 Dawn Purchase
Aquaculture Programme Manager