Study on Scaling-up EU cultivation of shellfish and algae

This study focuses specifically on the North and Baltic Seas and aims to enrich the knowledge of citizens and European policymakers on the positive contributions of extractive aquaculture in meeting the food needs of Europe’s population. This links especially to supporting the environment, benefiting the economy while ensuring it does not cause unacceptable negative impacts for future generations.

Therefore, this study focuses on existing and planned wind farms by 2030 to achieve the following results: 

• Predict the yields and potential impacts of seaweed farming, using outputs from operational oceanographic models mainly provided by Copernicus as drivers of our models.
• Use of these yield forecasts to optimise farms distribution to achieve the high yield targets for European extractive aquaculture.
• Quantify the impact of nutrient uptake by farms on local and regional concentrations and provide an estimate of the potential impact of reduced nutrient availability on downstream seaweed farm productivity in large-scale seaweed farming scenarios.
• Quantify the direct impact of extractive aquaculture on CO2 emissions.
• Estimate the effect of contaminants (provided by EMODnet) to quantify the impact on the viability for commercial use of the production.
• A socio-economic study is also being carried out on the implementation of seaweed and shellfish farming in wind farms.