Factoring in Energy Use When Assessing the Sustainability of Commercial Fisheries and Aquaculture

Energy use is an important factor when evaluating the sustainability of commercial wild caught and farmed seafood products. Measuring fuel inputs to fishing and fish farming can provide a transparent proxy for carbon footprint and can be a useful tool for comparing the environmental sustainability of seafood products.  While it is not general practice for fishing vessels or fish farms to report fuel or energy use, doing so can be an important mechanism for improving environmental performance. Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program (SFW) is incorporating energy use into our science based methodology for assessing the sustainability of both wild caught and farmed seafood products. For wild-capture fisheries, this will be a standardized metric of “Fuel Use Intensity” (FUI). For aquaculture it will be a measure of direct farm-level energy use plus an indirect measure of the fuel used to produce feed ingredients from fisheries and agriculture. Recognizing that commercial fisheries and fish farms can achieve both environmental and financial benefits from reducing their carbon footprint, SFW aims to incentivize the provision of fuel use data to both track and improve the sustainability of seafood products.