Abstract
In the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, livestock has a dominant place. It is generally considered as water, energy and land-intensive. Aquaculture could provide additional animal protein and contribute to meeting the food demand. However, aquaculture requires natural resources and causes freshwater pollution due to aquafeed, fertilizer, and hormone use. This study assesses the sustainability of aquaculture using the indicators water footprint (WF), energy footprint (EF) and land footprint (LF), comparing results with livestock. It uses extensive, semi-intensive and intensive Tilapia aquaculture in Mexico as a case study including broodstock, breeding, fattening, processing, and transportation phases. Tilapia production in intensive aquaculture has the largest footprints. Blue WFs are smallest in semi-intensive systems; green WFs, EFs and LFs are smallest for extensive systems. For protein, tilapia from intensive systems has the largest WF (126 l/g protein), beef (51 l/g), pork (33 l/g) and poultry (14 l/g) have smaller WFs. EFs per unit of protein or nutritional energy fall in the range of values for beef, poultry and pork. LFs of Tilapia (m2/kg) are larger than LFs of poultry but fall in the range of beef and pork. Per unit of nutritional energy EFs are similar to EFs for beef but larger than EFs of poultry and pork. From a FEW nexus perspective, it is not more sustainable to replace livestock with Tilapia. Tilapia requires more freshwater than beef, pork and poultry and pollutes larger amounts of water. For energy and land, Tilapia is not the better choice, because footprints are comparable.
Highlights
Energy, water and land are the main natural resources to produce food
This study aims to fill this gap by assessing the water footprint (WF), energy footprint (EF) and land footprint (LF) of Tilapia produced in extensive, semi-intensive and intensive aquacultural systems and to compare results with footprints of different meat types
Tilapia production carried out in an intensive aquaculture system has blue WFs larger than WFs of extensive and semi-intensive systems. This is partly due to the dependency of intensive systems on high refreshment rates of 250% of the pond water per day, in the semi-intensive system rates are only 30%
Summary
Population and affluence increase might challenge the provision of sufficient food and constrain our basic natural resources (Liu et al, 2020). The nexus approach, introduced at the Bonn conference in 2011 in prepa ration of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, for the first time showed the importance of a system approach and the relationships amongst water, energy, food security and land use (Hoff, 2011). Water and food systems showing these linkages should evaluate them in terms of sustainability, resilience and feasibility, indicating how they can be managed (Stigson, 2013). South Asia, encountering pressure on water resources, limited energy security and land resources, faces difficulty to feed its growing populations, requiring proper management to handle synergies and trade-offs in food, water and energy on a river basin-level (Rasul, 2014). South Asia, encountering pressure on water resources, limited energy security and land resources, faces difficulty to feed its growing populations, requiring proper management to handle synergies and trade-offs in food, water and energy on a river basin-level (Rasul, 2014). Pittock et al (2015) argue that there are considerable opportunities to
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