Assessing the environmental costs of Atlantic salmon cage culture in the Northeast Pacific in perspective with the costs associated with other forms of food production

摘要

There are environmental costs associated with every form of food production and none of these appear sustainable at the present time. The goal of a rational society should be to achieve sustainability of all food production and use of natural resources. That means understanding the environmental costs associated with all forms of agriculture, aquaculture and the harvesting of wild stocks. Those costs should then be prioritized and society should focus its energies on efficiently solving the most demanding problems. In a global sense, those most demanding problems likely involve topsoil losses and the availability of fresh water. It has been obvious for several decades that the oceans' food resources are being over-exploited and few jurisdictions have been successful in managing the harvest of fish and shellfish. Aquaculture holds a promise to supplement the ocean's bounty. Small scale aquaculture is an ancient practice, but industrial scale aquaculture is relatively new and because of its scale, itcan potentially carry significant environmental costs which must be managed to insure that they do not become widespread or irreversible. Aquaculture's emergence as a major source of seafood has created social and economic tensions within some societiesthat are played out as environmental issues using keywords and terms such as sustainability. This paper describes the near-field environmental response to organic enrichment associated with salmon aquaculture in the Northeast Pacific. It is emphasized that the conclusions reached for this region cannot be applied to all salmon producing areas. Environment Risk Analysis (ERA) and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) must be at least regionally specific and in most cases they must be specific to individual sites orgroups of sites.