Designing environmentally efficient aquafeeds through the use of multicriteria decision support tools

Abstract

Aquaculture is the fastest growing food production system, and the sector accounts for more than half of all fish consumed. Its potential as a sustainable food source has been recognised within the EU Farm to Fork strategy and by the targeting of EU Green Deal research funds. Aquafeed is the primary source of environmental cost in farmed finfish and shrimp life cycle assessments (LCA), and thus, emerging ingredients have a key role to play in increasing its sustainability. This paper proposes that the development and ‘design’ of feed compositions can be disrupted by innovative approaches that simultaneously optimise—via multicriteria analysis—ingredient selection through leveraging economic, nutritional, life cycle cost and environmental datasets. This would be supported by the ongoing collection and curation of these same resources. Further, integration of these disparate resources can enable advanced ingredient traceability. The outcome of such an approach would greatly contribute to increasingly efficient aquafeed production.