Towards improved practices in Life Cycle Assessment of seafood and other aquatic products

Excerpt

Aquatic supply chains, based on e.g. fish, molluscs, crustaceans and algae, provide products aimed for direct or indirect human consumption and other uses. Global demand for these products is increasing, but the fact that wild-capture fisheries—supplying inputs for the food and feed industries—have stagnated (FAO 2016), or even declined (Pauly and Zeller 2016), has raised questions about the environmental consequences of aquatic supply chains (Ziegler et al. 2016). Research applying LCA to seafood products has emerged since the early years of the century and, until today, dozens of case studies of fisheries and aquaculture systems from all around the world have been published. The body of literature in this field has grown to the extent of allowing systematic reviews to be undertaken on specific production sectors, such as for capture fisheries (Vázquez-Rowe et al. 2012; Avadí and Fréon 2013) and aquaculture (Henriksson et al. 2012). …