AquaAccept - developing novel socio-environmental indicators and management tools for a sustainable aquaculture

Around the world, there is an increasing governmental emphasis on developing the aquaculture industry in an environmentally, economically and socially sustainable manner and Norway is moving in the same direction. The main objective of the proposed project is to investigate the acceptable impacts of aquaculture on marine coastal systems. Focus will be on biological indicators, social acceptability and integrated management in a multidisciplinary approach. The environmental sustainability of aquaculture will be supported through the development of environmental indexes for monitoring, based largely on on-line, real-time tools. The social acceptance for aquaculture will be studied both in Ireland (EU) and in Norway to explore rationalities and priorities present in the different end-user groups and potential conflicts of interests. The environmental and social findings will be merged in a novel managing tool in order to calculate conflict scores, generate matrices of interactions, plot maps, evaluate spatial and/or temporal interactions existing in a specific marine coastal area, calculate overlaps or rank the effects of synergies and conflicts by the calculation of stress levels.