Norway’s setting minister has dominated out a ban on open-net fish farming at sea regardless of acknowledging that the wild North Atlantic salmon is below “existential risk”.
With yearly exports of 1.2m tonnes, Norway is the biggest producer of farmed salmon on this planet. However its wild salmon inhabitants has fallen from greater than 1,000,000 within the early Eighties to about 500,000 immediately.
Whereas the decimation of the wild inhabitants is largely because of the local weather disaster, the nation’s salmon business, which has had escapes of farmed fish and a important rise in sea lice parasites, has helped scale back numbers to a historic low, ensuing within the closure of 33 rivers to salmon fishing final summer season.
Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, the local weather and setting minister, mentioned his job was “to not cease or shut down human exercise itself” however somewhat to incentivise industrial manufacturing whereas lowering air pollution to an “acceptable stage”.
“That is principally an existential risk towards the wild Atlantic salmon and if we overlook that I don’t assume we will do the measures that we have to do,” he informed a gathering on Norwegian salmon rivers on the Lacking Salmon Alliance convention in London final week.
Eriksen mentioned: “In case you have a look at wild salmon, 2024 was an exceptionally dangerous 12 months but it surely didn’t stand alone as a result of the 2 different worst years that we had had been in 2023 and 2021.
“So it’s actually a part of a development and it symbolises one thing. To me, what it symbolises is that the influence from every thing that we do is changing into greater than nature, our shares, can really deal with” he added.
However regardless of this acknowledgment, the minister informed the Guardian later that he wouldn’t be in search of to cease open-net sea farming.
“In case you have a look at the aquaculture business, they produce meals, that’s actually necessary to individuals everywhere in the world, and the aim is to have the ability to produce that meals sustainably sooner or later,” he mentioned.
“My major subject is due to this fact not with the manufacturing itself, it’s with the air pollution and the influence that air pollution has on the setting. That’s what we have to deal with,” Eriksen mentioned.
“And that’s additionally why we have to work to get a regulatory system that incentivises manufacturing however inside air pollution ranges that aren’t detrimental to wild Atlantic shares.”
He mentioned it was not but recognized whether or not Norwegian salmon rivers could be in enough well being to reopen for this 12 months’s fishing season however that they’d have a greater thought by the spring.
As a substitute of curbing open-net sea farming, regardless of being urged to take action by campaigners, the minister mentioned he deliberate as an alternative to hunt an “acceptable stage” of air pollution for the wild salmon inhabitants.
“There are ranges of air pollution that the setting can deal with and that may be inside limits that wild Atlantic salmon shares can deal with as effectively. So discovering that stage is basically what we have to go ahead. And for some areas that may be zero.”
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