Addressing Sustainability: Energy consumption of two Atlantic salmon smolt hatcheries

摘要

Commercial aquaculture is driven by production costs and economic returns, but conventional economic analyses do not typically include societal costs due to ecological or environmental change, thus actual production costs may be seriously underestimated. Sustainable development implies that food production should be as efficient as possible and have minimal adverse environmental impacts. While reducing the adverse environmental effects of human activities is a desirable and even necessary goal, theredoes not appear to be a clear and comprehensive definition of what it actually means, nor how to achieve it. Different food production systems have different labour, energy, and physical components. To compare these systems from the perspective of sustainability it is necessary to evaluate the components of each system using some type of "common currency."