Aquaculture growth in Europe and beyond
Aquaculture in Europe has experienced significant growth in recent years, particularly in the organic sector. According to Eurostat, the total organic surface area in the EU-27 increased by 55.6% between 2012 and 2020, with key contributors including France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. The EU remains one of the largest markets for organic products globally, with the value of organic food at the retail level reaching €44.8 billion in 2020, a 707% increase since 2000. Germany and France led the market with €15 billion and €12.7 billion in organic food sales, respectively. While the EU market share for organic seafood remains relatively small, aquaculture is growing, particularly in high-value species such as trout, carp, and mussels. Austria, for example, set ambitious aquaculture growth targets, aiming to increase trout production to 4,000 tonnes and carp farming to 1,000 tonnes by 2020, showing the sector’s strong potential for expansion.
Despite its successes, aquaculture faces multiple challenges, including environmental sustainability, economic viability, and regulatory compliance. Key concerns involve pollution from nutrient discharge, habitat degradation, and disease management. Climate change is expected to exacerbate these issues by increasing water temperatures, altering ocean chemistry, and affecting fish stock health. Additionally, aquaculture businesses must comply with stringent EU regulations such as the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), and the Water Framework Directive (WFD), which aim to ensure sustainable growth while mitigating environmental impacts.
However, balancing compliance with economic feasibility remains a significant challenge for operators, particularly small-scale farmers. Future regulatory pressures, including the European Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy, are likely to impose additional sustainability requirements on the sector.
- Environmental Impacts: Aquaculture operations can contribute to pollution through nutrient discharge, affecting surrounding ecosystems. Managing interactions between farmed and wild species is essential to prevent ecological imbalances.
- Disease and Biosecurity: The spread of diseases, such as sea lice, poses significant risks to fish health and production yields. There is a need for tools to predict and mitigate disease outbreaks effectively.
- Production Optimization: Balancing sustainable production with cost efficiency and minimizing environmental footprints requires access to high-resolution data for site-specific aquaculture planning.
- Regulatory Compliance: Meeting stringent environmental and operational standards imposed by national and international policies necessitates robust monitoring and reporting systems.
Addressing these challenges is crucial for the sustainable growth of the aquaculture sector in the EU.
Iliad Digital Twin Solutions
Iliad services address the identified challenges in the following ways:
- Environmental Impacts: By providing real-time environmental monitoring dashboards, ILIAD enables stakeholders to track water quality parameters such as oxygen levels, temperature, and salinity. Alerts for conditions that may lead to disease outbreaks or environmental stress help in proactive management.
- Disease and Biosecurity: Predictive models simulate the spread of pathogens like sea lice, allowing for timely interventions. Growth rate models assist in optimizing production cycles, reducing the risk of disease proliferation.
- Production Optimization: Spatial planning tools, including GIS-based platforms, identify optimal farm locations while minimizing environmental impacts. Integration with habitat suitability maps facilitates species-specific aquaculture planning.
- Regulatory Compliance: Compliance monitoring systems ensure adherence to national and international environmental standards. Interfaces for reporting data to regulatory authorities streamline the compliance process.
By leveraging these tools, the Iliad DTOs support the aquaculture sector in meeting policy goals and overcoming operational challenges.
Services offered
Iliad provides aquaculture services tailored to address these challenges through various tools:
Aquaculture Smart Monitoring – Norway Risk Metrics
The tool provides a comprehensive monitoring framework for Norway's aquaculture sector, enabling detailed tracking of environmental conditions and acute impacts. It serves as an analytical tool for assessing risks and predicting adverse events, from parasites and infections over algal blooms to marine traffic related pollution. By facilitating informed decision-making, it supports the industry's commitment to sustainability and regulatory compliance. This technology acts as an indispensable resource for maintaining ecological balance while pursuing the growth of aquaculture.
The DT will facilitate real-time monitoring of water quality, temperature, and salinity at aquaculture sites. It will provide prediction models for sea lice transport based on oceanographic data and integrate with environmental data for site-specific risk assessments.
The twin will analyze operational and historical data related to aquaculture sites for the purpose of performance, operational support and continuous improvement with respect to fish welfare, environmental footprint, infections, counter measurements and environmental conditions:
- Available data from public sources for a location is compared to other locations (e.g. you perform in the top 30%)
- Available data for other periods (your situation compared to the same time the year before)
- Performance development over time.
The solution will relate to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and set targets and support ESG and CSRD reporting requirements.
Aquasafe – Kuriat Island Aquaculture, Tunisia
- Advanced tools for monitoring marine conditions around aquaculture operations.
- Habitat analysis to optimize the placement of fish farms for minimal environmental disruption.
Physical/chemical parameters in mussel farming – Mussel aquaculture, Italy
This tool provides a sensor-based marine weather data collection for offshore mussel farms. This is increasingly important to monitor nutrient availability and detect stressful events for farmed organisms and farm facilities such as marine storms and excessive temperature rises. This model manages data from sensors located inside a mussel farm in Italy and makes them viewable and downloadable, also to be used in the case of damage to the farm or product deaths as evidence to be delivered to insurance companies. The models predict the impact of environmental changes on mussel growth rates and offer tools for optimizing harvest timing based on growth projections.
SI-AD – RTTA Morocco Aquaculture
This tool provides real-time data integration for aquaculture planning and operations. It also offers monitoring tools to ensure compliance with environmental regulations. The tool facilitates elements of Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) by identifying and assigning productive sites, while taking into consideration ecosystem health to support the sustainable growth of the aquaculture industry.
These services equip stakeholders with the necessary tools to enhance sustainability, efficiency, and compliance in aquaculture operations.
