October 4, 2024 — After several years of overfishing, Northeast Atlantic pelagic stocks are reaching a critical point.
Overfishing over the past decade has largely been due to coastal states such as Norway, the U.K., the Faroe Islands, and the E.U. being unable to come to a quota-sharing agreement with every player involved, resulting in unilateral quotas that exceed recommended catch totals from the International Council on Exploration of the Sea (ICES).
February 13, 2023 — Bergen, Norway-based Proximar Seafood has secured JPY 8.8 billion (USD 66 million, EUR 61 million) in financing via a loan offer from a syndicate that includes two Japanese banks for the land-based salmon farm it’s building near Tokyo, Japan.
The offer consisted of a highly confident letter along with a term sheet – which the company said should be “considered a strong statement of comfort from the banks” on providing the financing the company needs for its salmon recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) facility, currently under construction in in Shizuoka Prefecture. The names of the banks were not released by Proximar. Proximar signed a contract with RAS specialist AquaMaof in early 2020 for a design and build of a facility with a 5,300 MT annual production capacity of gutted salmon in its first phase.
October 12, 2022 — New measures restricting Russian fishing boats’ access to Norway to just three ports are being introduced by the Norwegian government.
Norway said it plans to swiftly implement the move to prevent Russian vessels from circumventing sanctions implemented in response to the invasion of Ukraine, according to Norway Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt.
September 15, 2022 — Researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway, have used the CRISPR/Cas9 method of gene editing to produce salmon that cannot produce gametes (eggs and sperm), so cannot reproduce.
If produced for commercial purposes, any escaped fish would be unable to breed with the wild salmon population. They would also not experience the issue of early sexual maturation, which can lead to poor meat quality and greater susceptibility to disease, according to Lene Kleppe, a researcher working on the project.
May 31, 2022 — The company behind a controversial plan to build an industrial-scale salmon farm in Frenchman Bay is taking its case to court after the Maine Department of Marine Resources terminated its lease application last month.
American Aquafarms filed a complaint against the state in Cumberland County Superior Court last week. The Portland company, funded by Norwegian investors, proposed raising 66 million pounds of Atlantic salmon annually at two closed, 15-pen sites in Frenchman Bay, between Bar Harbor and Gouldsboro, with each pen encompassing 60 acres. The company also proposed operating a fish processing plant in Gouldsboro.
In its complaint, American Aquafarms alleges that the department’s decision was not supported by evidence. It also claims that the department spoke with a third party without its knowledge just days before the decision, violating American Aquafarms’ right to due process.
The state’s marine regulatory body terminated the application April 19. There were two major issues with it, said Jeff Nichols, department spokesperson.
First, the company failed to find a proper source for its fish eggs, according to Patrick Keliher, commissioner of the department. The hatchery listed in the application, AquaBounty in Newfoundland, is not on Maine’s list of qualified egg sources.
American Aquafarms also failed to show that the proposed hatchery satisfied genetic requirements mandated by state law, Keliher said.
May 16, 2022 — Numerologists, sharpen your pencils. Last year President Joe Biden pitched an offshore wind goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030 for the US. Now California has just chimed in with a 3-gigawatt goal of its own. In the meantime, the relatively small nation of Norway has just let slip word of a 30-gigawatt goal, too. Norway might be the most interesting case among the three, considering that it already has 34 gigawatts in hydropower under its belt. So, what gives?
US Goes From (Practically) Zero To Thirty
The Atlantic coast alone has a 22-gigawatt potential, but so far just a few turbines are currently operating off the coast of only two Atlantic states, Rhode Island and Virginia. All together they add up to a handful of megawatts, while other nations are piling on the gigawatts.
The Obama administration did try to coordinate offshore wind development along the Atlantic coast, only to be stymied by coastal state governors, among other objectors. Then, the Trump administration dug in its heels against the US offshore wind industry, which is no surprise considering the former President’s notorious distaste for wind turbines, especially those located out at sea.
Actually, there was a surprise. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is a branch of the US Department of the Interior, apparently did not get the Trump administration’s offshore wind memo. BOEM continued to work on offshore lease auctions throughout the Trump administration. BOEM also put the finishing touches on a first-of-its-kind process aimed at speeding up the offshore permitting process.
March 23, 2022 — Norway-based marine and energy insurance firm Hydor has decided to put an end to its contract covering a fleet of ships that were found participating in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) tuna fishing, the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) reported.
The fleet of three ships – currently named Israr 1, 2, and 3 – has operated in the Atlantic for years and was blacklisted in December 2021 by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), following an EJF report detailing the fleet’s illicit activities. EJF’s attention was first drawn to the fleet when satellite monitoring of the vessels’ movements demonstrated they were long-lining for tuna without registering with ICCAT, the regional fishery management organization that oversees the Atlantic tuna-fishing sector.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
March 15, 2022 — Although focus is increasingly placed on sustainability policies and blue economy models among Arctic nations, the systematization of structured transnational collaboration in the circumpolar north has been underdeveloped. Over the past three years, as one of its objectives, the AlaskaNor project has aimed to identify the economic and social effects of the fisheries and aquaculture sectors in Alaska and North Norway in a comparative context and make this knowledge available for relevant stakeholders and decision-makers.
Through a comprehensive quantitative assessment of the status quo, challenges and opportunities of the fisheries and aquaculture sectors in both Arctic regions, the project demonstrated that both Alaska and North Norway are strong frontiers in fisheries and aquaculture production, with outstanding economic performance on the global market. The project’s assessment aimed at helping both regions to develop platforms and networks for further interaction while achieving sustainable and diversified economies.
Knowledge exchange
With salmon production being an invaluable source of income and employment in both regions, there is potential for Alaska and North Norway to learn from each other’s practices, despite salmon industries being carried out in a fundamentally different manner. While finfish farming is forbidden by Alaska law, Alaska’s successful development of hatcheries and the management of salmon stocks could offer sustainability lessons to Norwegian businesses. In turn, North Norway’s highly profitable aquaculture could offer successful strategies for reaching and maintaining new markets. Groundfish fisheries management could also benefit from knowledge and best practice exchange, given that both regions are currently exposed to the impacts of climate change, including diminishing Arctic sea ice, ocean acidification and higher sea surface temperatures, all of which affect groundfish habitation, nutrition and migration patterns.
July 2, 2021 — Hundreds of thousands of salmon swim against the current in southeast Norway—in massive indoor tanks away from the nearest river as the controversial industry increasingly embraces greener land-based facilities.
The fish live in two gigantic pools inside an inconspicuous industrial building in Fredrikstad owned by a company that plans to raise salmon in similar settings even further afield, in the United States.
By raising the salmon on land, the industry is attempting to move away from the river or sea cages that have invited criticism over a slew of issues.
The problems run from costly mass escapes to fish infected with sea lice treated with chemicals to mounds of faeces and feed piling up on the seabed below the farms.
“At sea, you depend on the almighty for many things. In a land-based farm, we are suddenly the all-powerful one,” Fredrikstad Seafoods general manager Roger Fredriksen told AFP.
June 9, 2021 — An international team of scientists is preparing to trap a dozen baleen whales off the coast of Norway and conduct hearing tests on them to gauge their sensitivity to human-made sounds such as sonar.
Researchers have tested the auditory faculties of smaller animals in captivity, but this would be the first time scientists have ever captured live whales in the wild to assess their hearing.
“This has been a long-standing issue, this lack of information on how sensitive the hearing of these large whales is,” said the project’s principal investigator Dorian Houser, of the National Marine Mammal Foundation.
“We’re trying to get the first measurements to empirically show what they hear and how sensitive to sound they are,” he said.
The goal of the project, which was initiated and is partly funded by the U.S. government, is to use what they learn to regulate human-generated noise in the waters where these whales swim. It could have implications for the military as well energy companies.