In addition to presenting the Sea Around Us Project
Global Mariculture Database, we are also providing linkage to the Global Aquaculture
Performance Index (GAPI), which has been developed by Dr. John Volpe and
the Seafood Ecology Research
Group at the University of Victoria, Canada. The first phase of development
has been supported by the Lenfest Ocean
Program.
GAPI is a
science-based, data-driven tool enabling rigorous and objective evaluation of
the environmental performance of marine aquaculture production systems. Derived
from Yale and Columbia University’s 2008 Environmental Performance Index
(EPI), the GAPI empowers interested parties and key policymakers to make more
informed and ultimately more sustainable decisions related to their farmed
seafood purchases and policies, respectively.
Similar to the
EPI, the GAPI employs a proximity-to-target methodology, which measures how
close specific country-species pairs (i.e. Norwegian Atlantic cod, Scottish
Atlantic salmon) come to established environmental performance targets for
aquaculture. For instance, if the ecological target for fishmeal and oil is set
at zero fish sourced from unsustainable fisheries, GAPI measures how close a
country-species pair comes to meeting this target with the proximity measured
on a scale from 0 to 100 (where 100 represents achievement of the target).
The attractiveness
of GAPI as both a policy and market-based tool is that it allows an informed
analysis on many different levels. From a policy perspective, it allows us to
examine not only how well a country’s aquaculture sector is performing relative
to other countries, but it offers insight into the opportunities for
environmental improvement. From a markets perspective, GAPI allows seafood
purchasers to compare their options not only among producers of an individual
species (e.g., how does Norwegian farmed salmon compare to Chilean farmed
salmon) but across species as well (e.g., how does Norwegian farmed cod compare
to Scottish farmed salmon). Data can be aggregated to understand how the entire
industry is performing (e.g., how far is the farmed salmon industry from our
ecological targets) or can be broken out to compare performance within
individual issue areas (e.g., how well is Norway performing on
disease/parasites compared to Scotland). Additionally, GAPI can be used to
quantitatively benchmark existing aquaculture standards to determine and
compare how close these come to set ecological targets.
