Global Salmon Life Cycle Assessment

My Ecotrust colleagues have put out a press release on findings from our salmon LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) project. Here are the main points:

• Fish should swim, not fly. Air-freighting salmon, and any food, results in substantial increases in environmental impacts. If more frozen food were consumed, more container ships would be used to ship food.

• Container ships are by far the most efficient and carbon-friendly way to transport food. Globally, the majority of salmon fillets are currently consumed fresh and never frozen. In fish-loving Japan, which gets much of its fish by air, switching to 75 percent frozen salmon would have more benefit than all of Europe eating locally farmed salmon. The choice to buy frozen matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed.

• A full life cycle assessment approach to research provides a more nuanced process for informed decision-making. Even food has a life cycle, and we must comprehend the full impact to make meaningful improvements to food systems. Tradeoffs may be inevitable.

• Contrary to what is widely perceived, the vast majority of broad-scale resource use and environmental impacts (energy inputs, GHG emissions, etc) from conventional salmon farming result from the feeds used to produce them. What happens at or around a farm site may be important for local ecological reasons but contributes very little to global scale concerns such as global warming.

• Across the globe, what is used to feed salmon and the amounts of feeds used vary widely. As a result, impacts are very different. Norwegian salmon farming resulted in generally lower overall impacts while farmed salmon production in the UK resulted in the greatest impacts.

• Reducing the amount of animal-derived inputs to feeds (e.g. fish meals and oils along with livestock derived meals) in favor of plant-based feed inputs can markedly reduce environmental impacts.

• Growing organic salmon using fish meals and oils from very resource intensive fisheries results in impacts very similar to conventional farmed salmon production.

• If not planned carefully, technological fixes aimed at addressing local environmental challenges associated with conventional salmon farming can result in substantial increases in global-scale environmental impacts. In general, salmon fisheries result in relatively low global-scale environmental impacts. However, substantial differences exist between how salmon are caught. Catching salmon in large nets as they school together has one-tenth the impact of catching them in small numbers using baited hooks and lures.