ASC seeks views on ways to farm fish in marine protected areas
Certification body the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) is launching a stakeholder consultation focused on how aquaculture can operate responsibly within and around marine protected areas.
Running from today (March 9) to April 9, the 30-day consultation will gather input from key stakeholders and forms part of ASC’s broader work to address environmental risks to biodiversity, habitats, and ecosystem processes in protected areas.
ASC environmental standards coordinator Dan Auwkit said: “As aquaculture becomes central to feeding a growing global population and protected areas continue to expand, there is a clear opportunity to better align food production with conservation goals. By bringing greater clarity to how aquaculture can operate responsibly within or near protected areas, we can support biodiversity protection while enabling responsible aquaculture for the future.”
A practical approach
ASC said it will engage a broad range of stakeholders to ensure the resulting framework is scientifically robust, practical, and aligned with global conservation objectives.
“We aim to reach producers, NGOs, academia, civil society representatives, retailers and brands, suppliers, industry actors and certification bodies, with multiple opportunities to provide input at key stages,” ASC said in a press release.
The project will include a detailed review of existing ASC requirements and interpretation guidance, comparing them with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) protected area categories and relevant national legislation to identify gaps or inconsistencies.
Risk-based assessment
A key output will be the development of a risk-based compatibility assessment to help determine where aquaculture operations are compatible with the objectives of a protected area.
ASC said this assessment will use broad, practical criteria, not prescriptive thresholds, to provide farms with a clear understanding of how aquaculture activities may align with protected area objectives and give auditors a consistent way of assessing compliance across different contexts.
Key outputs, following project completion in 2028, will include revised requirements within a future version of the ASC Farm Standard ASC Standards, and a jointly developed ASC–IUCN white paper. The framework will be tested in selected geographies to ensure it is practical, scalable, and applicable across different regulatory and ecological contexts.
The problems with protection
The designation of protected status to areas where fish farms have operated for years has caused problems in Chile, severely limiting opportunities for expansion and casting doubt over the long-term future of sites. Daniel Mas Valdés, who will serve as the Minister of Economy and Mining under new right-wing president Antonio Kast, is expected to slash regulations that hold back growth.
In 2023 in Scotland, the then Net Zero Secretary Mairi McAllan was forced to withdraw plans to arbitrarily designate 10% of its seas as Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs) in which both fishing and fish farming would have been banned.
Three Scottish National Party MSPs including Kate Forbes and Fergus Ewing voted against the plan and three others abstained in a vote in the Scottish Parliament.
A consultation about HPMAs prompted 4,000 responses and fears that the proposals would destroy fragile coastal communities that rely on fishing and aquaculture. Ewing described the consultation document as “a notice of execution” for fishing communities.
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), which have fewer restrictions than the HPMAs that had been proposed, already cover 37% of Scotland’s seas.
