Global Salmon LCA — Phase I: North-East Pacific
What are the quantitative, life cycle environmental and socioeconomic impacts associated with the provision of salmon for human consumption from the North-East Pacific? In answering this overarching question, this research will address a number of closely related sub-questions including:
- What are the life cycle impacts associated with contemporary commercial salmon fisheries in the NE Pacific, up to the point at which salmon are delivered to the dockside including differences that result from the three dominant fishing gears used in the region (purse seine, gillnet and troll)?
- What are the life cycle impacts associated with contemporary farmed salmon production in the NE Pacific up to the point of salmon delivered to the dockside?
- What additional impacts result from extending the analyses to include processing, storage, transporting, handling, retailing and consumption of three commonly found, consumer-ready product forms derived from both farmed or commercially caught fish (e.g. 500gm pack of smoked salmon, 200gm frozen fillet, etc.)?
- How do the impacts in 1, 2 and 3 above compare?
- Reflecting the growing interest in “green” (e.g. land-based) and organic alternative farmed salmon production systems, how would a shift to these modes of production alter the life cycle impacts?
NE Pacific salmon production (in metric tons)
Salmon were selected as the primary focus of this study because:
- Salmon have become one of the most widely consumed seafood products in the industrialized world, it is an international super-commodity — a uniform food product available fresh on demand around the globe (Eagle et al. 2004);
- Many of their derivative products are highly substitutable, i.e. they compete directly in the marketplace (Anderson and Fong 1997, Clayton and Gordon 1999);
- Production from the two industries (capture fisheries and aquaculture) is currently broadly of a comparable scale globally;
- There is significant public interest at present regarding the relative environmental impacts associated with both salmon fishing and farming, driven in part by research on the health risks and environmental impacts of these activities (Hites et al. 2004, Krkosek et al. 2005), and
- Detailed data from both of these industrial activities are relatively readily available from local, state and federal agencies and from the project team’s extensive network of industry and scientific contacts.
While it is our intention to ultimately expand this research to address impacts associated with salmon farming practices, and in particular differences in feed formulations, in the two dominant production regions globally, the NE Atlantic and Chile, the North-East Pacific (British Columbia and Alaska) is the obvious geographic focus for the initial phase of the research since all forms of capture fisheries and culture systems, including state-of-the art net pens, organic methods and land-based systems operate here.
Pertaining to concerns about ecological interactions of salmon production systems (such as disease transmission in the case of farming) in the study region, we expect this project to yield a range of ancillary results that may be of interest to local policy initiatives. In addition to expanding the LCA framework to incorporate a comparative category for biological impacts, we suspect that our empirical research on specific production systems will yield descriptive results that are relevant to siting decisions and regional policy initiatives. Similarly, the fieldwork will yield data and information on the financial specifications of various production systems, enhancing our understanding of the operating costs and business models associated with different salmon production systems in both capture fisheries and aquaculture.
Funding for this project has been generously provided by
the Lenfest Ocean Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts
