If the global aquaculture industry is to meet growing demand for healthy food and remain resilient enough to play a key role in ensuring food security, there are several steps it needs to take to scale up sustainably.
One of those steps is ensuring that aquaculture is proactive instead of reactive in adapting to and addressing relevant environmental concerns, Cermaq Global CEO Steven Rafferty said at the 2025 Blue Food Innovation Summit in London, U.K.
“Salmon has huge potential to fulfill its nutritional role, but the industry has struggled to expand due to environmental concerns, regulatory restrictions, and rising fish mortality rates, which impact sustainability and confidence in the sector. In addition, climate change has restricted the number of production areas [available to farm],” Rafferty said.
An effective sustainability strategy should help mitigate some of those issues, Rafferty said, and Erik Giercksky, the United Nations’ global impact head of sustainable ocean business, added that investing further in R&D to improve farming systems would help the industry continue to grow at a sustainable rate.
Those innovations would also allow the industry to transfer knowledge, innovation, and technological solutions from advanced, industrialized sectors such as salmon to other species, he said.
“Food security is one of the most pressing issues for the United Nations. For the aquaculture industry to really grow, we need to have a trickle down of knowledge and investment,” Giercksky said.
Adopting new technology and making more efficient use of current technology as part of a smart farming strategy has played a large part in the growth of salmon-farming firm Mowi, for example, according to Catarina Martins, Mowi’s chief technology and sustainability officer.
“Since 2018, [Mowi’s] production has increased at a rate of 6 percent per year. The company has ambitions to produce 650,000 MT per year by 2029, equating to 40 million nutritious meals,” she said.
Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) CEO Chris Ninnes highlighted the importance of providing those meals, saying that an additional 25 million MT of seafood will be needed to feed the world’s growing population by 2030, more than 90 percent of which will come from aquaculture.
“ASC has 40 percent of global salmon under certification, but to drive into Asia, the approach needs to be different. Less than 25 percent of seafood in Asia is going into markets that demand sustainability,” Ninnes said. “We need to find the incentive pathways for the remaining 75 percent, and that is a big challenge.”
Nevertheless, Rafferty highlighted that the aquaculture industry needs help from governments and other regulatory bodies in order to be sustainable, especially as the reporting landscape has become more complex, with investors, banks, and customers all requiring different amounts of information.
In other words, the onus can not just be on the aquaculture industry, which, in the current environment, can find it difficult to navigate and expensive to conform, he said.
“For the first 20 years in the salmon industry, we were not good enough at taking care of everything. It’s much better now, but we shouldn’t go too far with planning and regulations, or the industry may become too costly to run,” Rafferty said.
Furthering his point, Rafferty said reassurance is needed that regulations won’t change in the future to upend progress made thus far.
