Best practices in life cycle assessment implementation in fisheries. Improving and broadening environmental assessment for seafood production systems

A total of 33 publications have been reviewed in order to determine the current state-of-the-art of LCA development in fishery based seafood production systems, focusing mainly on methodological innovations and the different assumptions that are taken into consideration in the different stages of LCA. The assessment revealed a strong proliferation of LCA in seafood systems in recent years, but unequal levels of methodological development. Based on this evaluation, the article proposes a simple and straightforward guideline to set a common denominator for future seafood system LCA studies. Finally, innovation pathways that may potentially turn LCA into a more integrated methodology to evaluate the environmental performance of seafood systems are discussed throughout the review.

Introduction

Environmental burdens related to seafood production systems have been the center of numerous studies in recent years due to increasing worries regarding the state of world fisheries (Worm et al., 2009) and the uncertain impacts that increasing aquaculture production may generate in different ecosystems (Naylor, Eagle, & Smith, 2003; Read & Fernandes, 2003). Despite supplying the world with roughly 90 million tons of fish in 2009, 32% of fisheries were identified as being overexploited (28%), depleted (3%) or recovering from depletion (1%) in 2008, representing the highest proportion of this segment ever recorded (FAO, 2010). Aquaculture, on the contrary, supplied nations with over 55 million tons of fish, 32% more than in 2004, constituting, therefore, the fastest-growing animal-food-producing sector (FAO, 2006; 2010).

While fisheries struggle to maintain productivity due to overexploitation (Pauly et al., 2002; Pauly, Bennett, Christensen, Tyedmers, & Watson, 2003), growth in seafood demand is being partially satisfied thanks to aquaculture production, even though certain aquaculture techniques create important ecological impact in wild fish supplies (FAO, 2010; Naylor et al., 2000). Therefore, in a scenario in which seafood demand is maintained based on increasing the potential hazards on populations and ecosystems, environmental assessment methodologies appear as appropriate mechanisms to evaluate and supervise the environmental performance of fishing activities. In fact, despite the environmental issues that may affect other important dietary supplies for humans, seafood is the only nutritional group that suffers a potential risk of depletion if current trends do not swing in future decades (Pauly, Christensen, Dalsgaard, Froese, & Torres, 1998; 2003). Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has arisen as a well-known and widely used standardized environmental management tool to analyze the environmental burdens along the life cycle of products and processes (ISO 14040, 2006a, 2006b). It has proved to be a convenient method for quantifying resource use and emissions in a wide range of primary and industrial sectors, including seafood extraction/production and its associated industrial processes (Pelletier et al., 2007).

However, the efficacy of LCA to cover the wide range of environmental impacts potentially linked to fishing still has certain constraints, since many direct impacts on fishing stocks cannot be assessed without further development of the methodology (Pelletier et al., 2007; Ziegler et al., 2011). Consequently, improvements are ongoing to add new impact categories and/or indicators to envelop the unique characteristics of fisheries. Moreover, it is expected that NGOs will take their awareness campaigns a step further with the aim of alerting the population of the environmental risks that underlie fish consumption (Jacquet & Pauly, 2007). Hence, an increasing number of stakeholders in the seafood sector will be willing to analyze and communicate the environmental performance of their products in order to gain market access and competitiveness.

This review focuses on analyzing the main milestones that have been developed in seafood LCA in recent years, including methodological innovations, functional unit (FU) choice, impact category selection, allocation methods or life cycle inventory (LCI) elaboration, with the aim of providing a simple and straightforward guideline to set a common denominator for future seafood system LCA studies. An additional goal of the study is to point out the major innovation pathways that may potentially turn LCA into a more integrated methodology to evaluate the environmental performance of seafood systems. Nevertheless, given the distinct characteristics of aquaculture and wild caught fishing this article focuses exclusively on reviewing those seafood products that are attributable to wild caught ecosystems, so called fisheries, leaving farmed products out of the scope of the manuscript (see Henriksson, Guinée, Kleijn, and de Snoo (2012) for a recent review on LCA of aquaculture systems).