Chile is among the world’s largest seafood producing regions, generating more than $6 billion in annual revenue from wild fisheries and aquaculture exports and employing 130,000 coastal residents. A significant portion of the industry is comprised of farmed salmon, which is the country’s biggest food export with a value of about $4.8 billion annually. However, the salmon industry also has an outsized environmental impact; excess nutrient pollution from salmon aquaculture can cause algal blooms that deplete oxygen from the ocean and threaten aquatic life.
After several decades of rapid growth, Chile is also the largest wild seaweed harvester, accounting for 40% of all seaweed harvested globally. While most of Chile’s seaweed harvesting is small-scale, the cumulative impact is degrading some coastal ecosystems at an alarming rate. Because seaweed forests provide an essential habitat for over 100 marine taxa, remove nutrient pollution from coastal waterways, and can act as a carbon sink, current and future harvest levels must be analyzed and considered for their impact.
Restorative seaweed aquaculture presents a unique opportunity to help mitigate the impacts of salmon farming while providing sustainable livelihoods for coastal communities and potentially reducing harvesting pressures on wild seaweed. With funding from the Walmart Foundation, The Nature Conservancy is working to catalyze the seaweed industry’s growth and maximize benefits for people and nature. In partnership with dozens of stakeholders, including local communities, fishermen, the seaweed aquaculture industry, and local and national government agencies, TNC is developing a vision and roadmap for seaweed aquaculture in Chile. The roadmap will create a vision, strategy, and goals for a sustainable industry, focusing on social and livelihood opportunities, market challenges and opportunities, technical bottlenecks, necessary investments in infrastructure and supporting services for scale, and policy development needs.
In conjunction with the roadmap, TNC and academic partners from Universidad de Los Lagos are conducting in-water research. To demonstrate the economic and operational feasibility of seaweed aquaculture, we have developed a pilot site in a community-based Benthic Resources Management and Exploitation Area implemented by the Fishermen's Union "Nueva Ventura." Additionally, by growing seaweed in and/or near Chilean seafood company Blumar Seafood's salmon cage infrastructure, we will assess seaweed's ability to mitigate the water quality impacts of salmon farming.
The seaweed aquaculture roadmap as well as research findings will be distributed widely among relevant stakeholders at the conclusion of the project. Through these collaborative efforts, we are paving the way for a more sustainable future where Chile’s marine ecosystems and community-based businesses can thrive together.