Impact of Climate Change on Aquaculture: The Need for Alternative Feed Components

Özet

The impact of Climate Change on all fisheries activities, both capture and aquaculture is expected to be extreme, including: higher water temperatures, increased water acidity and migration of species from established to new waters. For aquaculture there is the added problem of providing feeds under these new conditions. The supply of fishmeal and fish oils is already considered a barrier to the growth of aquaculture at a time when an expanding world population needs feeding and capture fisheries are at their maximum and may decline in the future. The current use of plant-based aquaculture feeds (PBAF) to replace fishmeal relies on a few major crops such as soya, maize and wheat which could be used for direct human consumption and all will be affected adversely by Climate Change. There is a need to investigate alternative crops to those used now and this will include those which are currently classed as, "underutilised". Such crops already have beneficial characteristics such as drought and temperature resistance, the ability to grow and yield on poor soils and good nutritional properties. For aquaculture feeds they need investigation for process ability, the presence of anti nutritional components, storage stability and application to the correct fish species in aquaculture. This paper will discuss these aspects with examples of possible underutilised crops for aquaculture feeds and the need for experimental work on the impact of Climate Change on aquaculture practices