Measuring sustainability in aquaculture systems

Abstract

Summary

Sustainability should be approached by four dimensions (scopes): economic, environmental, social and governance. All of them are important and should be equally considered. The huge difficulty to evaluate sustainability is the challenge to explore and analyze a system in a holistic way. It is essential to contemplate all dimensions of the production process and compare measurements of variables from very different nature. A few papers have been published using Ecological Footprint, Life Cycle Analysis and Energy Analysis to assess the sustainability of aquatic production systems. These methods give an integrated overview of the systems and are very useful. However, all of them request a huge amount of data, which is difficult to obtain. In addition, the two first focus mainly on environmental dimension.