79439 AUTHOR ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT FINAL PUBLICATION INFORMATION Relationship of Freshwater Aquaculture Production to Renewable Freshwater Resources The definitive version of the text was subsequently published in Journal of Applied Aquaculture, 24(2), 2012-05-25 Published by Taylor and Francis THE FINAL PUBLISHED VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE IS AVAILABLE ON THE PUBLISHER’S PLATFORM This Author Accepted Manuscript is copyrighted by the World Bank and published by Taylor and Francis. It is posted here by agreement between them. Changes resulting from the publishing process—such as editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms—may not be reflected in this version of the text. You may download, copy, and distribute this Author Accepted Manuscript for noncommercial purposes. Your license is limited by the following restrictions: (1) You may use this Author Accepted Manuscript for noncommercial purposes only under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. (2) The integrity of the work and identification of the author, copyright owner, and publisher must be preserved in any copy. (3) You must attribute this Author Accepted Manuscript in the following format: This is an Author Accepted Manuscript of an Article by Boyd, Claude E.; Li, Li; Brummett, Randall Relationship of Freshwater Aquaculture Production to Renewable Freshwater Resources © World Bank, published in the Journal of Applied Aquaculture24(2) 2012-05-25 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ © 2013 The World Bank Relationship of Freshwater Aquaculture Production to Renewable Freshwater Resources Claude E. Boyd* & Li Li Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures, Auburn University, Alabama 36849 USA Randall Brummett World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433 USA Keywords: freshwater aquaculture production, water use in aquaculture, aquaculture and environment, water resources Running Head: Freshwater use in aquaculture *Corresponding author. E-mail: boydce1@auburn.edu 1 ABSTRACT At the country-level, freshwater aquaculture production was correlated (P < 0.05) with area, renewable freshwater, and population increased – the strongest tendency was with population. Intensity of freshwater use for aquaculture in 172 countries was estimated by dividing freshwater aquaculture production (tonne/yr) by total natural renewable freshwater (km3/yr). The freshwater aquaculture production:renewable freshwater ratio (AFR) varied from 0 to 15,000 tonne/km3. Country-level AFRs were assigned to classes: no freshwater aquaculture, (n = 35); low, < 100 tonne/km3 (n = 80); medium, 100-1,000 tonne/km3 (n = 45); high, > 1,000 tonne/km3 (n = 12). Most renewable freshwater is in countries with no freshwater aquaculture or low AFR; countries with high AFR contain 11.1% of global renewable freshwater. By FAO region, AFR values were: Oceania, 1.56 tonne/km3; Latin America and Caribbean, 31.1 tonne/km3; North America, 50.0 tonne/km3; Europe, 68.7 tonne/km3; Africa, 84.1 tonne/km3; Asia, 2,409 tonne/km3. Renewable freshwater appears adequate for considerable expansion of aquaculture – especially outside Asia. 2 INTRODUCTION The urgent need to increase food production to nourish a growing world population is widely acknowledged. Approximately 15% of global animal protein supply is derived from fish and shellfish. The current population of 6.91 billion consumes an estimated 117.8 million tonne/yr of fisheries products (FAO, 2010). Capture fisheries apparently have reached or possibly exceeded a sustainable limit, while world population is expected to increase by about 32% to 9.15 billion by 2050 (World Bank 2010). Aquaculture currently contributes nearly 50% of current production and of this freshwater aquaculture accounts for 35.0 million tonne/yr or 63.5% (FAO 2010). With no change in per capita consumption, a population of 9.15 billion will demand about 156 million tonne/yr of fisheries products of which freshwater aquaculture will need to contribute some 54 million tonne/yr. However, resource use efficiency is an issue for aquaculture (Pillay, 2004; Tacon et al., 2006; Boyd et al., 2007; Tucker and Hargreaves, 2008). With respect to water, Boyd (2005) presented procedures for estimating total and consumptive water use by aquaculture facilities. Verdegem and Bosma (2009) estimated that total water use in freshwater aquaculture averages about 16.9 m3/kg production representing 429 km3/yr globally. This is between 1 and 4% of the usual estimates of the world’s renewable freshwater supply. There is considerable scope for obtaining more production per unit of water through intensification (Boyd, 2005; The World Bank, 2006; Verdegem and Bosma, 2009), but this will inevitably involve trade-offs with other natural resource uses. In any case, little information has 3 been presented to date on the extent to which freshwater water supplies are a constraint to the expansion of aquaculture. The present study evaluates the current relationship between freshwater aquaculture production and renewable freshwater for different countries and attempts to infer the degree to which aquaculture will be limited by availability of freshwater in the future. MATERIALS AND METHODS Estimates of annual total natural renewable freshwater: the sum of surface runoff within a country, all surface water flowing into the country from neighboring countries and renewable groundwater, were obtained from Gleick (2009) for 172 of the world’s 224 countries. In most countries flows of both surface water and groundwater enter from and exit to neighboring countries but the amount of these gains and losses seldom balances at the country level. In order to avoid the problem of multiple accounting that would result from summing country-level data for a region, total internal natural renewable freshwater estimates for the FAO regions were obtained from the FAO Aquastat Program website (www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/dbase/index.stm). The sum of the estimates of total internal natural renewable freshwater for the FAO regions of the world is 43,764 m3/yr – quite similar to the traditional estimate of 39,700 m3/yr based on the difference between precipitation falling on land masses and evapotranspiration from land masses (Baumgartner and Reichel 1975). Freshwater aquaculture production data were obtained for these countries from FAO fisheries statistics (Fishstat 2011). An indicator of the intensity of water use for freshwater aquaculture was estimated for each country using the following equation: 4 where AFR is the freshwater aquaculture production to renewable freshwater ratio (tonne/km3), AP is freshwater aquaculture production in 2008 (tonne/yr) and RF is the total renewable freshwater (km3/yr) according to Gleick (2009). The AFR also was estimated for continent and GLOBAL levels by combining country data accordingly. Scatter diagrams were used to depict relationships at the country level among total renewable freshwater, land area (http://data.worldbank.org/), population (http://data.worldbank.org/), and freshwater aquaculture production. The range of these variables was great; log10 transformation was used to simplify graphical presentation. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Freshwater is not uniformly distributed globally and differences in the availability of freshwater are one reason that population also is not uniformly distributed. It is therefore not surprising that the amounts of renewable freshwater and country surface areas were positively correlated (R2 = 0.557) (Fig. 1). Positive correlations were also found between country surface area, amount of renewable freshwater and population (Fig. 1) (R2 = 0.570 and 0.421, respectively). In short, large countries tend to have more renewable freshwater and larger populations than smaller countries. 5 Freshwater aquaculture production was not highly correlated with either renewable freshwater (R2 = 0.271) or area (R2 = 0.123) (Fig. 1). A higher correlation (R2 = 0.513) was found between population and aquaculture production (Fig. 1). This relationship seems logical because a country with a greater population will require proportionally more food than a country of smaller population. There are no doubt interactions among the relationships shown in Fig. 1, and other factors. Availability of land suitable for aquaculture, climate, political stability, government policy, cultural food preferences and fish market integration affect a country’s aquacultural production. Nevertheless, a country’s population size seems to be a major variable influencing the amount of aquaculture. This is likely a key reason why heavily populated Asian countries have such a large amount of aquaculture production compared to other regions (Table 1). The world average AFR of 721 tonne/km3 is influenced greatly by the high AFR (2,409 tonne/km3) for Asia, and particularly by the AFR of 7,344 tonne/km3 for China (Table 1). Removing China from the calculation reduces AFR for Asia to 957 tonne/km3 and for the world to 263 tonne/km3. The global AFR excluding Asia is only 48.9 tonne/km3. Africa, North America, and Europe have fairly similar AFRs – these three continents have a combined AFR of 65.0 tonne/km3. Oceania, Latin America and Caribbean have lower AFRs – their combined AFR is 29.1 tonne/km3. The AFR values were placed in four classes as follows: no freshwater aquaculture, 35 countries; low, 80 countries with AFR < 100 tonne/km3; medium, 45 countries with AFR > 100 but < 1000 6 tonne/km3; high, 12 countries with AFR > 1,000 tonne/km3 (Tables 2 and 3). Africa had the most countries with no aquaculture, while Europe had the most countries with low AFR. The most countries with medium and high AFR were in Asia. The averages and standard deviations for AFRs by class were: low, 22.4  26.6 tonne/km3; medium, 291.8  203.8 tonne/km3; high, 4,154.8  4,619.7 tonne/km3. Individual country AFRs were heavily skewed to the left (lower AFR) indicating considerable scope for expansion within the existing water resource base (Fig. 2). Of the 172 countries for which renewable freshwater data were available, 35 reported no reported freshwater aquaculture to FAO. For the 137 countries reporting freshwater aquaculture production, AFR ranged from < 1 tonne/km3 to 7,344 tonne/km3 in China, 11,324 tonne/m3 in Israel and 15,000 tonne/km3 in Kuwait. The latter two of these are small, water-restricted countries and two others in the high AFR class are large, water-restricted countries (Egypt and Iran). The amounts of total natural renewable freshwater represented by each AFR class were: no aquaculture, 1,909 km3; low, 34,097 km3; medium, 12,926 km3; high, 6,356 km3. Thus, about 65% of the world’s renewable freshwater is in countries that have no freshwater aquaculture or fall into the low AFR class. The projected freshwater aquaculture production needed to maintain current world consumption of fisheries products was estimated to be about 55.1 million tonne/yr by 2050. This level of production equates to a world AFR of 1,259 tonne/km3. Tripling production in the low-income and food insecure countries of Latin America and Africa would result in AFR in these regions 7 increasing from 31.1 tonne/km3 to 93 tonne/km3 and from 84.1 tonne/km3 to 252 tonne/km3, respectively, still below the theoretical technical maxima measured in high AFR countries. From our analysis, overall availability of freshwater at country and regional levels is not a constraint to meeting future global fish and shellfish demand by increasing aquaculture. The main negative environmental issues related to high freshwater aquaculture production at the country level are competition with other water uses and water pollution resulting from aquaculture (Boyd et al., 2007). Based on regional studies of individual aquaculture industries such as channel catfish, (Ictalurus punctatus), in the southeastern United States (Boyd et al., 2000; Tucker and Hargreaves, 2008), and Pangasius catfish in Vietnam (Bosma et al., 2009), aquaculture appears to be a relatively small contributor to water pollution and water use conflicts as compared to some other activities. AFR roughly approximates aquaculture production system intensity and increasing AFR may thus be the most environmentally affordable means of raising overall output within the existing freshwater resource base. Technology to reduce water consumption by over 60% is already available (Verdegem & Bosma 2009). However, increasing AFR in many Asian countries, and especially in China, would result in higher AFRs in a region where values are already much greater than in the rest of the world and could reach levels that confront environmental, energy and input constraints to further increases. Eco-label certification programs are increasingly used to create market incentives for aquaculture producers to use systems that treat the environment responsibly (Clay, 2008). Water use 8 efficiency and intensity should be considered important components of environmental sustainability. Considering that freshwater availability overall is a major concern for 21st century global society, AFR, which embodies these might thus serve as a useful indicator of wise water management in aquaculture. REFERENCES Baumgartner, A. and E. Reichel. 1975. The world water balance. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Bosma, R.H., C.T.T. Hanh, and J. Potting, editors. 2009. Environmental impact assessment of the pangasius sector in the Mekong Delta. Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development/Department of Aquaculture, The Netherlands: Wageningen University Boyd, C.E. 2005. Water use in aquaculture. World Aquaculture 36(3):12-15 and 70. Boyd, C.E., C S. Tucker, A. McNevin, K. Bostick, and J. Clay. 2007. Indicators of resource use efficiency and environmental performance in fish and crustacean aquaculture. Reviews in Fisheries Science 15:327-360. Boyd, C.E., J. Queiroz, J. Lee, M. Rowan, G.N. Whitis, and A. Gross. 2000. Environmental assessment of channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus, farming in Alabama. Journal of the World Aquaculture Society 31:511-544. Clay, J.W. 2008. The role of better management practices in environmental management. Pages 55-72 in C.S. Tucker and J.A. Hargreaves, eds. Environmental best management practices for aquaculture. Ames, IA: Wiley-Blackwell. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization). 2010. The state of world fisheries and aquaculture. FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, Rome, Italy. 9 FAO. 2011. FISHSTAT electronic database. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy. Gleick, P.H. 2009. The world’s water 2008-2009. Washington, DC: Island Press. Pillay, T.V.R. 2004. Aquaculture and the environment, 2nd edition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Tacon, A.G.J., M.R. Hasan, and R.P. Subasinghe. 2006. Use of fishery resources as food inputs to aquaculture development: trends and policy implications. FAO Fisheries Circular No. 1018, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy. Tucker, C.S. and J.A. Hargreaves, editors. 2008. Environmental best management practices for aquaculture. Ames, IA: Wiley-Blackwell. Verdegem, M.C.J. and R.H. Bosma. 2009. Water withdrawal for brackish and inland aquaculture, and options to produce more fish in ponds with present water use. Water Policy 11 (Supplement 1):52-68. World Bank. 2006. Aquaculture: changing the face of the waters, meeting the promise and challenge of sustainable aquaculture. Agriculture and Rural Development, Report No. 36622-GLB, The World Bank, Washington, D.C. World Bank. 2010. World Development Report; development and climate change. The World Bank, Washington, DC. 10 Table 1. Renewable freshwater, freshwater aquaculture production, and freshwater aquaculture production:renewable freshwater ratio (AFR) by FAO region. Renewable freshwater Freshwater aquaculture AFR Continent (km3/yr) (tonne/yr) (tonne/km3) Asia 12,461 30,015,550 2,409 (Asia without China) 9,649 9,234,485 957 Africa 3,950 332,113 84.1 North America 6,662 333,219 50.0 Europe 6,619 454,501 68.7 Latin America and Caribbean 13,161 408,692 31.1 Oceania 911 1,424 1.56 World 43,764 31,545,499 721 (World without China) 40,952 10,764,434 263 Table 2. Number of countries (n) and associated amounts of renewable freshwater (based on sum of country-level estimates) by FAO region and freshwater aquaculture production to renewable freshwater ratio (AFR) class. None, AFR = 0 tonne/km3; low, AFR < 100 tonne/km3; medium, AFR = 100 to 1,000 tonne/km3; high, AFR > 1,000 tonne/km3. None Low Medium High 3 3 Continent n km n km n km3 n km3 Latin America and Caribbean 1 3.8 16 14,917 7 3,370 0 0 North America 0 0 2 6,369 0 0 0 0 Asia 7 199 5 441 17 7,985 9 6,247 Europe 3 210 29 7,035 14 1,096 2 22 Oceania 2 442 2 1,227 0 0 0 0 Africa 18 1,040 26 4,122 7 475 1 87 World 35 1,909 80 34,087 45 12,926 12 6,356 11 Table 3. Countries with over 50 km3/yr of renewable freshwater listed by freshwater aquaculture production to renewable freshwater ratio (AFR) classes. The top ten freshwater aquaculture producers are in bold font (FAO 2010). AFR class Country Low (< 100 tonne/km3) Angola, Cameron, Congo, Congo (DR), Cote D’Ivoire, Gabon, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, South Africa, Sudan, Zambia, Canada, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Cambodia, Japan, Korea (DPR), Austria, Greece, Iceland, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Australia, and Papua New Guinea Medium (100-1,000 tonne/km3) Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Belize, Costa Rica, Honduras, United States, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iraq, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Turkey, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Ukraine High (> 1,000 tonne/km3) Egypt, China, India, Iran, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. 12 Fig. 1. Scatter diagrams of relationships among area, total natural renewable freshwater, population, and freshwater aquaculture production of counties. 13 Fig. 2. Frequency distribution histograms for the ratio of annual, freshwater aquaculture production to renewable freshwater resources (AFR) for countries with low (upper), medium (middle) and high (lower) AFR values. 14