By mid-century, society will need to significantly intensify the output of its food production system while simultaneously reducing that system’s detrimental impacts on climate, land use, freshwater resources, and biodiversity. This will require finding alternatives to carbon emissions-intensive agriculture, which provides the backbone of today’s global food production system. Here, we explore the hypothesis that marine algae-based aquaculture can help close the projected gap in society’s future nutritional demands while simultaneously improving environmental sustainability. Food production from marine algae-based aquaculture has the potential to contribute more than the total global protein demand projected for 2050, which ranges from 263.8 Mt/yr to 286.5 Mt/yr. It also offers important nutritional and environmental sustainability advantages relative to terrestrial agriculture. Marine algae can provide a better source of high-quality nutritional protein, essential amino acids, and other micronutrients relative to terrestrial plants. In addition, because marine algae do not require soil, irrigation, and the open application of fertilizer, their cultivation does not need to compete with agriculture for arable land and freshwater nor does it lead to fertilizer runoff and downstream eutrophication. Furthermore, by reducing agriculture’s demand for arable land and freshwater, marine algae-based aquaculture can reduce the pressure for deforestation, potentially leading to globally significant reductions in carbon emissions and biodiversity loss.
AUTHOR
Zackary Johnson
68 postsYou may also like
The unicellular Labyrinthulomycete protists have long been considered to play a significant role in ocean carbon cycling. However, their distribution and biogeochemical […]
Prochlorococcus, the smallest but most abundant marine primary producer, plays an important role in carbon cycling of the global ocean. As a […]
In this study, we investigated the environmental impacts of scallop culture on two coastal estuaries adjacent the Bohai Sea including developing a […]
Prochlorococcus, the smallest and most abundant phytoplankter in the ocean, is highly sensitive to hydrogen peroxide (HOOH), and co-occurring heterotrophs such as […]