Mariculture Twinning Exchange
PARTICIPANTS & PROJECTS INVOLVED
- Yellow Sea Large Marine Ecosystem, Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem
HOST INSTITUTION
- Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem
OTHER FUNDING PARTNERS
INTRODUCTION, PURPOSE: WHY AN EXCHANGE
The Yellow Sea Large Marine Ecosystem (YSLME) provides important socio-economic services -- provisioning, supporting/regulating, and cultural services – for the people living in large urban areas in the YSLME’s coastal zone as well as for the global population.
Among the 64 large marine ecosystems (LMEs) in the world oceans, the Yellow Sea LME has been one of the most significantly affected by human development. Today the Yellow Sea faces serious environmental problems, many of a transboundary nature, that arise from anthropogenic causes.
The Yellow Sea Large Marine Ecosystem Project is an ecosystem based effort support by the Global Environment Facility with the goal to achieve environmentally sustainable management and use of the YSLME and its watershed by reducing development stress and promoting sustainable exploitation of the ecosystem.
Fishing and mariculture are socio-economically utmost import activities in the Yellow Sea, providing employment opportunities, source of revenues and protein and livelihood for hundreds of thousands of artisanal and small scale fisher-men. Yet in order to allow for the recovery of depleted stocks fishing efforts in the Yellow Sea had to be drastically reduced. This reduction in fisheries efforts was only possible, socially and economically viable by making up for lost production from fisheries, maintaining livelihoods and nutritional security in the Yellow Sea by improving and developing new approaches in mariculture. Thus the development of regional strategies for sustainable management of fisheries and mariculture is a key element of the YSLME project. To ensure the negative impacts from mariculture are minimized, while productivity is enhanced, the issue of sustainability needs to be addressed. One of the solutions from the management actions of YSLME was the introduction of integrated multi-trophic polyculture i.e two or more species are cultured together, usually with some added benefit in terms of productivity. Integrated Multitrophic Aquculture is a type of polyculture where species from different trophic levels (eg. algae, fish and oysters) are cultured together so that the waste products of one species are utilized by another.
This approach, which is recognized as best environmental practice, allows to:
- Balance nutrients so that there is no detrimental effect of eutrophication
- increase the densities of the various culture species as a result of optimizing, without over-stretching the carrying capacity of the bay and through utilizing the 3 dimensional culture space.
- To increase the profitability of these systems as a result of integration
This has allowed the Yellow Sea to become a key supplier of mariculture products for the global supply chain while reducing detrimental environmental impacts; the region accounts for 10 percent of the world’s mariculture production.
Mariculture is rapidly increasing and becoming more important in the Guinea Current LME. The prevailing type being developed in the GCLME is conventional one dimensional mariculture, with some 70% of the feeds provided to fish ending up as unused nutrients in the GCLME’s coastal waters. This additional nutrient input into the GCLME’s coastal water has the potential to contribute to eutrophication, oxygen depletion, hypoxia as well as harmful algal blooms.
In order to support the GCLME countries to develop mariculture along a sustainable development path, allowing to gain economic beneficts, reducing the pressure on partly over-used fish stocks while maintaining food security and providing income opportunities for the ever growing population in the GCLME’s coastal region, Best Environmental Practice needs to be presented and disseminated by experts coming from the YSLME. This will constitute an extremely good opportunity for a South-South exchange, making crucial know-how and Best Appropriate Technology accessible for West and Central Africa. To allow for the broadest possible dissemination across the 16 GCLME countries, the Regional Coordination Unit will organize a regional workshop to which decision makers as well as businessmen active in conventional aquaculture will be invited.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- To enhance the understanding of key decision makers in the public and private sector on the potential of Multitrophic Aquaculture to improve business efficiency while reducing detrimental environmental impacts in the same time.
- To present Practical Experience, Best Environmental Practice and Best Appropriate Technology in Integrated Multitrophic Aquaculture to decision makers from public and private sector
- To support targeted learning through structured discussions at expert level and discuss the requirements for an ecosystem wide up-scaling of Integrated Multitrophic Aquaculture in the GCLME
OUTPUTS/OUTCOMES
1. Outcome:
- To achieve higher profitability of Aquaculture in the GCLME with a lower environmental impact by introduce the concept of Multitrophic Aquaculture. Decision makers in the GCLME are to learn from the top experts in this field from the YSLME
2. Outputs:
- A training and awareness creation workshop held for 50 decision makers from private and public sector
- Action plan for a demonstration and the LME wide up-scaling developed
- Specific page on the potential of Multitrophic Aquaculture developed for the IGCC webpage
- Establishment of a community of practioners of Multitrophic Aquaculture launched in the GCLME
3.Outputs beneficial to IW portfolio:
- Lesson learned in the LME can be made available for other GEF IW LME projects
4. IW Experience Note:
- An experience note on how the YSLME experience was taken up and deemed suitable for replication by decision makers in the GCLME will be produced
