Op-ed: Are aquaculture sustainability certifications broken?

Per-Erik Schulze is a Norwegian marine ecologist, and Randi Storhaug is the vice-president of the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature. Their joint op-ed complements a recent open letter sent by seven Norwegian NGOs to the Norwegian government on the status of aquaculture in the country, as well as conversations with Chilean NGOs highlighting similar problems they say are present in the The South American country’s aquaculture sector.

Norway and Chile together account for approx 75 percent of global farmed salmon production.

This year, the world’s largest aquaculture certification groups – Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) – will revise their standards. Yet both plans fail to meet their objectives self-described missions of ensuring “safe, responsible and ethical farm-raised seafood.”

In both Norway and Chile, certified farms operate outside their permitted permits, destroy the environment, falsify data and even operate within marine protected areas. So if farmed salmon certification standards are violated, who is really looking out for consumers and the environment?

Norwegian seafood is generally marketed as sustainable, well-managed and sourced from a healthy, clean ocean, and at the time of writing, Norway has 348 ASC-certified fish farms.

However, despite the large numbers, Norway’s salmon farming industry is in trouble. In January 2024, seven national environmental NGOs, representing hundreds of local groups and highlighting the growing concerns of communities along the country’s coast, the Norwegian government has submitted a petition for a rapid phasing out of salmon farming in open net cages. They also called for reducing the overall number of farmed fish in the sea and establishing more protected zones.

Overcrowded pens in large, intensive fish farms are breeding grounds for diseases and outbreaks of fish lice. Salmon farms in Norway are facing problems urgent problems due to the poor health of the fish and mass mortality, with many sites losing more than 30% 25 percent of their total production. Other consequences include: enormous pollution cause harm algae bloom and dead zones in the fjords, as well cross between escaped farmed salmon and wild salmonthus decreasing the survival rate of offspring in wild populations.

Almost no salmon farm or company in Norway adheres to the regulations, at, Inspection data shows. Falsifying monitoring data and hiding problems from authorities is not uncommon. Norway’s eco-crime police units have introduced a new term, ‘aquaculture crime’, which they are labeling as ‘high risk’ after seeing repeated violations. The aquaculture sector has done that environmental impact assessments that are too weak at many of their locations, resulting in contamination of cold water coral reefs and other habitat destruction.

As a serious example of unsustainable ASC certification, the Salmar company received the ASC quality mark for one salmon farm located right in the middle of the Froan Nature Reservea national conservation area designated to protect important seabird and seal colonies.

ASC is considered largely ineffective by these Norwegian NGOs. Worse still, a “sustainability certification” of today’s salmon farms, companies and/or methods could be interpreted as greenwashing. In 2016, the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature criticized ASC for the first time for the lax criteria it used to evaluate the serious impacts of climate change. use of chemicals and refugees from fish farms about companies competing for ASC certification.

Similarly, in Chile, the cracks in the sustainable certification of farmed salmon only really started to show when Nova Austral got involved was found to be operating above the permit allowance, even within the so-called “protected” waters of the Alberto de Agostini National Park. It was also cited by the Chilean government falsifying mortality data.

Once a shining example of sustainable salmon production in Chile, Nova Austral has achieved the distinction of receiving the largest fine ever imposed by Chile’s Superintendency of the Environment (SMA) for violations of environmental regulations. Today, Nova Austral still operates in what are intended to be protected national parks. Unfortunately, Nova Austral is not an anomaly in Chile.

In 2023, the SMA imposed 35 sanctions against several companies for non-compliance. Many of these companies were simultaneously certified under the BAP scheme. For example, in 2022, four violations were imposed on the company Granja Marina Tornagaleones, including one serious violation for seabed pollution. Yet this same company received several salmon and trout farms certifications from BAP.

Canadian fishing company Cooke Aquaculture has been too cited by the SMA for overproduction at several Chilean BAP-certified sites, with a Chilean newspaper reporting that a Cooke site in the Laguna San Rafael National Park produced 6,000 percent more than his allowed volume.

Compounding the problem, there has been explosive growth in the Chilean and Norwegian farmed salmon industries over the past thirty years. The proven track record of environmentally destructive practices of many Chilean aquaculture companies is disastrous for the Patagonian ecosystem, just as it is in the fjords of Norway.

Industrial waste pollutes coasts and changes landscapes. Pesticides and antibiotics used to control pests and diseases such as sea lice leach into the environment and harm many native species. Between 2004 and 2021 8.5 million salmon escaped from production centers in Chile.

In Norway, the country’s Fisheries Directorate, the authority that manages farmed fish escapes, received 172 calls from the general public reporting farmed fish escapes in 2023 alone.

“No one knows how many farmed fish escape each year because the accuracy of keeping fish records in each pen is so low,” says the researcher. management completed.

Salmon species are not native to the Southern Hemisphere and refugees from farmed pens have major environmental impacts on native fish due to salmon’s status as a new top predator. While wild salmon are present in rivers in the Northern Hemisphere, the number of farmed salmon in Norway still significantly exceeds wild salmon, making disease and contamination of the wild gene pool a major risk.

Global retailers often rely on third-party certifications, such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), BAP and ASC, to provide assurances that the seafood they source is sustainably and ethically sourced. These certifications should form the backbone of many retailers’ sustainable policies.

It seems that these certifications now act as a shield that protects certain companies and allows them to destroy the environment. More recently, aquaculture certifications have weakened the concept of protected areas, turning them into paper parks by allowing industrial production that is directly incompatible with their true purpose.

There could be an economic incentive for “sustainable aquaculture” certifications to continue to have low standards. Standard-setting bodies make money from logo licensing or certification activities. This gives them an economic incentive to certify as many fisheries and facilities as possible. In 2022, the Global Seafood Alliance, BAP’s parent company, made $19 million (17.8 million euros), of which almost 95 percent comes from certification costs. ASC earned $16.2 million (15.2 million euros) that same year, with 86 percent of that total coming from logo licensing costs.

While the Chilean and Norwegian coasts are in dire straits due to aquaculture, most of the same companies have achieved sustainable certification in many locations. The companies are allowed to move fish between locations and there is little to no traceability of the true sustainability of each salmon fillet.

It is clear that “sustainable” certifications are not an effective tool to prevent Chilean or Norwegian salmon farms from overproducing and causing environmental damage, and cannot even prevent them from operating legally under permitted conditions.

Global retailers must come out from behind the Certification Shield and make protecting pristine ecosystems a priority by refusing to buy salmon raised in protected areas or in production areas that have problems with pollution, fish diseases and escaped farmed fish.