February 19, 2025 — Humanity can farm more food from the seas to help feed the planet while shrinking mariculture’s negative impacts on biodiversity, according to new research led by the University of Michigan.
There is a catch, though: We need to be strategic about it.
“We can achieve this sustainable mariculture development,” said Deqiang Ma, who led the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability. “With strategic planning, we can achieve the goal of conserving marine species while meeting the global demand for the expansion of mariculture.”
Mariculture is the branch of aquaculture that farms saltwater seafood. In 2020, it accounted for about a fifth of the food farmed from fisheries, which is an important source of protein for billions of people worldwide.
Demand for seafood is going up and mariculture production is growing rapidly to help meet that, Ma said. To predict the impact of that growth, Ma and an international team of researchers developed a model to assess mariculture’s effects on the populations of more than 20,000 species of marine fauna.