Societal benefits and environmental performance of Chinese aquaculture

Abstract

Aquaculture has emerged as an alternative food production system, but it comes with both benefits and costs that need to be balanced. To evaluate the sustainable status of Chinese aquaculture, we quantify the benefits and costs of aquaculture in each province in China. We obtained the data on aquaculture production from the China Fisheries Statistical Yearbooks (2021) and used nine indicators to represent aquaculture benefits (nutrient, economy, and employment) and aquaculture costs (freshwater, energy, and land use, greenhouse gas, nitrogen, and phosphorus emissions). We found that the nine indicators varied among the 30 provinces in this study. The Southwest and South regions showed the highest benefits (SBS = 30.65) and costs (EPS = 38.55) at the regional level in composite aquaculture (freshwater and mariculture) respectively. At the provincial level, Tibet and Hainan had the largest score for aquaculture benefits (SBS = 82.90) and costs (EPS = 61.37) in composite aquaculture, respectively. Tibet province performed the best in freshwater and composite aquaculture (6.09 and 4.86 respectively), while Jiangsu province performed the best in mariculture according to benefits-to-costs ratio (2.71). More sustainable species production and use cleaner energy (such as hydro energy and nuclear energy etc) and reduce the feed conversion ratio are the direction of more sustainable aquaculture. This study provides the first analysis of Chinese aquaculture sustainability by benefits and costs, and more accurate data and more indicators through weighting could be included in this framework to achieve greater aquaculture assessment in the future.