Comparing Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Salmonid Aquaculture Production Systems: Status and Perspectives

Abstract

Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector worldwide, mostly driven by a steadily increasing protein demand. In response to growing ecological concerns, life cycle assessment (LCA) emerged as a key environmental tool to measure the impacts of various production systems, including aquaculture. In this review, we focused on farmed salmonids to perform an in-depth analysis, investigating methodologies and comparing results of LCA studies of this finfish family in relation to species and production technologies. Identifying the environmental strengths and weaknesses of salmonid production technologies is central to ensure that industrial actors and policymakers make informed choices to take the production of this important marine livestock to a more sustainable path. Three critical aspects of salmonid LCAs were studied based on 24 articles and reports: (1) Methodological application, (2) construction of inventories, and (3) comparison of production technologies across studies. Our first assessment provides an overview and compares important methodological choices. The second analysis maps the main foreground and background data sources, as well as the state of process inclusion and exclusion. In the third section, a first attempt to compare life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) and feed conversion ratio (FCR) data across production technologies was conducted using a single factor statistical protocol. Overall, findings suggested a lack of methodological completeness and reporting in the literature and demonstrated that inventories suffered from incomplete description and partial disclosure. Our attempt to compare LCA results across studies was challenging due to confounding factors and poor data availability, but useful as a first step in highlighting the importance of production technology for salmonids. In groups where the data was robust enough for statistical comparison, both differences and mean equalities were identified, allowing ranking of technology clusters based on their average scores. We statistically demonstrated that sea-based systems outperform land-based technology in terms of energy demand and that sea-based systems have a generally higher FCR than land-based ones. Cross-study analytics also strongly suggest that open systems generate on average more eutrophying emissions than closed designs. We further discuss how to overcome bottlenecks currently hampering such LCA meta-analysis. Arguments are made in favor of further developing cross-study LCA analysis, particularly by increasing the number of salmonid LCA available (to improve sample sizes) and by reforming in-depth LCA practices to enable full reproducibility and greater access to inventory data.

Integration of Transcriptome, Gross Morphology and Histopathology in the Gill of Sea Farmed Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar): Lessons From Multi-Site Sampling

“…Our study is the first to focus on the gill transcriptome of Atlantic salmon in a highly variable and complex environment of the marine production sites. We specifically chose to work on fish farmed in the open sea-based system (such as net pens), because (1) the use of net pens is currently the most common form of salmon production (Philis et al, 2019) and 2in the open pens, only nets separate the fish from the environment, making them prone to developing gill pathologies but also assisting with the tissue recovery through high water exchange FIGURE 8 | Top downstream effects predicted from gene expression in Atlantic salmon gills with moderate histopathology (sites A and B) vs low histopathology (site C). The analysis was performed on 311 salmon genes mapped to 235 human orthologs, using Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA).…”

Food-Based Dietary Guidelines for Seafood Do Not Translate into Increased Long-Chain Omega-3 Levels in the Diet for U.S. Consumers

“…Eating small, oily, pelagic fish will be important in meeting an increased LCn-3 consumption goal, as will salmon (and trout and char). There are multiple production platforms for salmon, each with a complementary suite of benefits and drawbacks from a life cycle assessment standpoint [47], and caution needs to be exercised in not blindly categorizing all aquaculture fish into high or low impact. Additionally, equity needs to be considered.…”

Resource-use efficiency in US aquaculture: farm-level comparisons across fish species and production systems

“…Nevertheless, LCA models have been used to draw conclusions about the relative 'sustainability' of species and production systems (Henriksson et al 2015, Yacout et al 2016, Hilborn et al 2018. The lack of transparency of methodologies, underlying assumptions, and characterization of datasets have prevented replication of results (Philis et al 2019). An egregious example is that of Hilborn et al (2018), who neglected to report that the data from which 'catfish' were judged to be 'highest impact' were primarily for production of Pangasius 2 .…”