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A 20-year retrospective review of global aquaculture

Nature volume 591, pages 551–563 (2021)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 06 July 2021

An Author Correction to this article was published on 26 April 2021

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Abstract

The sustainability of aquaculture has been debated intensely since 2000, when a review on the net contribution of aquaculture to world fish supplies was published in Nature. This paper reviews the developments in global aquaculture from 1997 to 2017, incorporating all industry sub-sectors and highlighting the integration of aquaculture in the global food system. Inland aquaculture—especially in Asia—has contributed the most to global production volumes and food security. Major gains have also occurred in aquaculture feed efficiency and fish nutrition, lowering the fish-in–fish-out ratio for all fed species, although the dependence on marine ingredients persists and reliance on terrestrial ingredients has increased. The culture of both molluscs and seaweed is increasingly recognized for its ecosystem services; however, the quantification, valuation, and market development of these services remain rare. The potential for molluscs and seaweed to support global nutritional security is underexploited. Management of pathogens, parasites, and pests remains a sustainability challenge industry-wide, and the effects of climate change on aquaculture remain uncertain and difficult to validate. Pressure on the aquaculture industry to embrace comprehensive sustainability measures during this 20-year period have improved the governance, technology, siting, and management in many cases.

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Fig. 1: Composition and growth of global live-weight aquaculture production.
Fig. 2: Interactions between sea and land.

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Acknowledgements

We thank W. Falcon, A. Albalat, D. Battisti, G. Stentiford, P. Edwards, A. Hughes, F. Pernet, E. Heupel, D. Francks and J. Kaull for comments and assistance, and all authors from the 2000 review in Nature1 for generating a constructive scientific discourse. Funding was provided through the Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University. M.T. acknowledges Formas project SEAWIN (2016-00227).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Rosamond L. Naylor

  2. Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Rosamond L. Naylor

  3. Aquaculture Research Institute, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA

    Ronald W. Hardy

  4. Centro i-mar & CeBiB, Universidad de Los Lagos, Puerto Montt, Chile

    Alejandro H. Buschmann

  5. Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Simon R. Bush

  6. School of Oceanography, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Ling Cao

  7. Center for Oceans, Conservation International, Arlington, VA, USA

    Dane H. Klinger

  8. Department of Nutrition, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Dane H. Klinger

  9. Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    David C. Little

  10. Department of Integrative Biology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Jane Lubchenco

  11. Department of Marine Sciences, University of Connecticut, Groton, CT, USA

    Sandra E. Shumway

  12. Beijer Institute, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden

    Max Troell

  13. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Max Troell

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  1. Rosamond L. Naylor
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Contributions

R.L.N. led, and R.W.H., A.H.B., S.R.B., L.C., D.H.K., D.C.L., J.L., S.E.S. and M.T. contributed to the conceptualization, analysis, literature review, writing, and responses to reviewer comments for this manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rosamond L. Naylor.

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Competing interests

R.L.N. is a member of the Forest Protection Advisory Panel at Cargill, and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) has received funding from the Cargill Foundation for visiting scholars and staff support, but not for research activities. She is also on the Scientific Advisory Board for Oceana and is the President of the Board of Directors for the Aspen Global Change Institute. She participates on the editorial board of Aquaculture Environment Interactions. D.H.K. is a member of the Technical Advisory Group for the Aquaculture Stewardship Council and a member of the Aquaculture Technical Advisory Committee of Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program. S.E.S. serves on the Advisory Committee on Aquaculture Science for DFO Canada (http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/aquaculture/advisory-comm-consultatif-eng.html). She is currently working on two white papers for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, and has previously chaired the Aquaculture Stewardship Council’s Technical Advisory Committee and the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch Advisory Committee. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Shellfish Research, and Editor-in-Chief for Reviews in Fisheries Science & Aquaculture. A.H.B. is on the Standards Oversight Committee of the Global Aquaculture Alliance. He has no affiliation with any for-profit company; all of his research is supported by the Chilean National Science Agency (ANID) and therefore has no conflict of interest with any aquaculture activity. S.R.B. is a member of the Standards Oversight Committee of the Global Aquaculture Alliance, the Multi-Stakeholder Group of Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch programme, the Technical Advisory Committee of the Good Fish Foundation in the Netherlands, and the Technical Advisory Committee of the Aquaculture Program of the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH). He has received funding from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch programme for the development of Aquaculture Governance Indicators. R.W.H. is Editor-in-Chief of Aquaculture Research. In the past five years, he served as Chair of a Global Aquaculture Alliance committee that revised and updated best practices standards for fish feeds, a project that was completed in 2019, prior to his participation on this Review. In the past, also prior to this Review, he has been a principal investigator for grants and contracts awarded to the University of Idaho and received grants and contracts from industry or industry groups including the United Soybean Board, Enz-A-Bac, Midwest Ag Enterprises, Ajinomoto NA and Knipbio to assess feed ingredients for sustainable aquaculture. L.C. is a judge of the global F3 (fish-free feed) challenge. She was on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Aquaculture Stewardship Council between 2017 and 2019. She has no affiliations with for-profit companies. D.C.L. has received in-kind and financial support from a wide range of commercial and non-commercial entities, serves as a committee member for standards organizations and is a director of a commercial tilapia hatchery in Thailand. J.L. until recently served on the boards of The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Oceano Azul Foundation, Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and Seafood Businesses for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS). She also co-chaired the Expert Group for the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy. She resigned from all of these roles in February 2021 when she took up her new position in the White House. M.T. is a member of the Program committee for The Marine and Coastal Science for Management (WIOMSA/MASMA), member of Action Areas and Solution Clusters Working Groups – Blue foods, United Nations Forum on Sustainability Standards (UNFSS), scientific lead for SeaBOS, and a Review Editor for Aquaculture Environment Interactions.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature thanks Peter Edwards, Adam Hughes, Fabrice Pernet, Grant Stentiford and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Number of species farmed for each production group (1950–2017).

a–g, The numbers of species farmed for all aquaculture (a), freshwater fish (b), algae and aquatic plants (c), molluscs (d), crustaceans (e), diadromous fish (f) and marine fish (g) are shown. Solid lines indicate the total number of species farmed. Dashed lines show the number of species that comprise up to 75% of the total production in each group, by tonnage. Production in each group is dominated by a small number of species but each group also contains high diversity. Production according to ASFIS identification. Source: FAO2.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Global forage fish landings (1950–2017) for 315 species.

Global forage fish landings are sensitive to interannual climate variation associated with El Niño Southern Oscillation events. Orange line represents the trend in presence of interannual variation. Data source: FAO2.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Global landings of forage fish used for fishmeal and fish oil production.

Orange line represents the trend in presence of interannual variation. Data source: Sea Around Us48.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Nominal and real prices of fishmeal and fish oil versus plant-based meals and oils.

Prices deflated by the implicit GDP deflator. Data sources: FAO International Commodity Price Database (2020), http://www.fao.org/giews/food-prices; Index mundi (2020), www.indexmundi.com; National Sunflower Association (2020), www.sunflowernsa.com; US Bureau of Economic Analysis (2020), https://www.bea.gov/.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Proportion of global aquaculture production that is certified or rated.

Data from the Seafood Watch Sustainability of Global Seafood Data portal collating volumes certified from the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) (2020) and Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA) Best Aquaculture Management (2020) and rated volumes from Seafood Watch (SFW) (2020). The ratings data represent the volume rates minus volumes certified based on internal assessments by SFW. The certification estimates may be overestimated as it was not possible to distinguish overlap between GAA- and ASC-certified volumes. A number of assumptions were made in these calculations as SFW does not recognize a number of species certified by ASC and GAA. These species include salmon, catfish, oysters, scallops, sturgeon, crawfish, and sea cucumber. In some cases, a surplus volume was created by adding GAA, ASC and SFW. This surplus volume was included in the ‘avoid’ category of SFW, under the assumption that cross-over between ratings and certification is more likely than certified and unrated production.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Proportion of aquaculture that is certified and rated by commodity group.

Data from the Seafood Watch Sustainability of Global Seafood Data portal collating volumes certified from the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) (2020) and Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA) (2020) and rated volumes from Seafood Watch (SFW) (2020). The ratings data represent the volume rates minus volumes certified based on internal assessments by SFW. The certification estimates may be overestimated as it was not possible to distinguish overlap between GAA- and ASC-certified volumes. A number of assumptions were made in these calculations as SFW does not recognize a number of species certified by ASC and GAA. These species include salmon, catfish, oysters, scallops, sturgeon, crawfish and sea cucumber. In some cases, a surplus volume was created by adding GAA, ASC and SFW. Surplus volumes were added to certification and subtracted from ratings for the different regions. This calculation was assumes that a certified product is more likely to be rated than not.

Extended Data Table 1 Regional volumes and global share of aquaculture production
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Extended Data Table 2 Feed use and efficiencies for 1997 and 2017
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Extended Data Table 3 Wild fish inputs relative to farmed fish output for 11 commonly farmed fed fish and shellfish (2017)
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Extended Data Table 4 Global algae production and share used as food (2017)
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Naylor, R.L., Hardy, R.W., Buschmann, A.H. et al. A 20-year retrospective review of global aquaculture. Nature 591, 551–563 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03308-6

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