4.) Mariculture: Help needed
Building more mariculture sites is listed among China’s top three priorities for aquaculture in 2018, and as a result, there will be an increased urgency to the country’s efforts to increase mariculture in cages off its coastline.
However, this effort is likely to bump against China’s pollution problem. Between 12 and 17 percent of the coastline is “severely polluted,” according to the latest annual report of the China Environmental Quality State Oceanic Administration.
Individual companies and ocean academies around the country have launched various pilot programs for deep-water offshore aquaculture. Yet big corporate money has yet to flow into the sector, in part due to the reluctance of big-money investors and insurance firms to cover what’s still a fledgling industry. There are signs that government will back and subsidise mariculture projects that combine renewable energy like solar panels (though the corrosiveness of seawater remains a problem).
