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Project Details
 Introduction
Introduction:
Aquaculture is the world’s fastest growing agri-food business. The
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has predicted sustained growth in
aquaculture, with total production reaching 35-40 million tonnes by the year
2011 (FAO 2002). In Canada, aquaculture has become an important food product
producer and employment provider. Revenues obtained from aquaculture industry
were $621.4 million and in 2000, reached $674.1 million. The national total
aquaculture gross output (including sales, subsidies and growth in inventories)
was $722.47 million in 2000, up $25.1 million from 1999 (Statistics Canada
2002).
Literature review. The relatively rapid development of aquaculture as an
important industry has posed many new challenges. This research proposes to
face these challenges through the application of management science problem
solving methodologies, including the development of geographical information
system models of the coastal zone, and multicriteria decision making tools
for developing policy and supporting complex decisions arising from the coastal
zone environmental and human systems including aquaculture.
Coastal aquaculture has great potential for the production of food and generation
of wealth for people living in coastal areas and is an important alternative
in the supply of products from the sea that can be better controlled and managed
(CAIA 2003). The challenges of coastal aquaculture have been receiving increasing
attention since many familiar commercial fish stocks are now fully exploited
(Lane and Stephenson 1998a). Coastal aquaculture is characterized by complex
interactions between resources, ecosystems and users, e.g., the vulnerability
of aquaculture to poor water quality and aquatic pollution caused by industrial,
domestic, agricultural as well as aquacultural wastes; rapid development where
the successes of the sector have been tarnished by environmental and resource
use issues, social problems, diseases, and marketing problems (Hites et al
2004). Appropriate approaches will need to integrate these issues into decision
making in order to promote sustainable development in the coastal zone (GESAMP
2001). To achieve this, aquaculture management can benefit from applying management
science problem-solving techniques including decision theory, simulation,
risk management, and control methods (Lane and Stephenson 1998b, Koktener-Karasakal
and Michalowski 2003). This proposal will apply management science modeling
and analysis methods in support of aquaculture decisions and policy development
in the coastal zone.
Applications of spatial decision support in aquaculture, have been published
by Nath et al. (2000) based on different scales ranging from local areas to
sub-national region, to national and continental expanses. They note that
planning activities to promote and monitor the growth of aquaculture in specific
areas inherently have a spatial component to capture biophysical and socio-economic
characteristics. Biophysical characteristics include criteria pertinent to
water quality, water quantity, and climate. Socio-economic characteristics
that are considered in aquaculture development include administrative regulations,
competing resource uses, market conditions (e.g., demand for fishery products
and accessibility to markets), infrastructure support, and availability of
technical expertise. Effective work in this area – as proposed in this
research - requires an integrated and multiple criteria approach to account
for the different biophysical and socio-economic characteristics of the system
(Allen et al 1992).
The application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in aquaculture has
been documented by Kapetsky and Travaglia (1995), Aguilar-Manjerrez and Ross
(1995), and Ross (1998). GIS is a powerful tool for assisting decision-makers,
and is already being applied effectively in aquaculture settings (LUCO 1998,
Arnold et al. 2000). Governmental agencies involved with issuing new aquaculture
permits need to perform spatial analysis on a proposed site to assess its
potential environmental, economic and social impacts on other locations. Carswell
(1998) presents an integrated information system named the British Columbia
Aquaculture System (BCAS) for the case of shellfish. The BCAS is based on
14 criteria proposed by Cross and Kingzett (1998) based on the Site Capability
Index (SCI) for shellfish. For finfish, 12 key biophysical criteria have been
applied by Caine (1987). Ross et al (1993) used a successive screening process
for different criteria identified to be of importance in evaluating aquaculture
sites. These criteria included depth, current velocity, salinity, dissolved
oxygen and temperature, etc. Each criterion was used to evaluate the entire
bay on the basis of a topographic map. Finally, all data were overlapped to
show the potential for salmonid cage culture. This study only used biophysical
characteristics in the analysis. In the proposed research, a similar approach
to Ross’ work using GIS but including socioeconomic factors is being
developed.
These GIS studies provide insight into the evaluation of environmental interactions
for this related research in the Bay of Fundy. The Bay of Fundy provides a
unique site for the development of new methodologies in light if its significant
aquaculture industry with known interactions with other coastal zone uses
including historically important fisheries (Stephenson 1990). Moreover, the
Bay of Fundy industry and communities constitute with government members an
interested and committed group of participants who have demonstrated they
are willing to be active participants in better evaluation and improved management
(AMEC 2003).
The perceptions of the different participants in the Bay of Fundy aquaculture
system require a decision structure that supports their participation and
takes into consideration their potentially conflicting views (Mardle and Pascoe
1999). This research will review the management science multicriteria methods
for complex problem solving as the structured means of including the perceptions
of aquaculture system stakeholders. One such multicriteria method is the Analytical
Hierarchy Process (AHP), a structured decision framework that breaks down
complex decision problems by decomposing them into explicit multiple criteria
and sub-criteria in a hierarchical structure (Saaty 1980, 1994). In multicriteria
problems, relevant decision criteria in the hierarchy framework are analysed
from participants’ feedback on the relative importance among the criteria
and sub-criteria. Direct feedback from participants will allow decision makers
to determine the trade-offs among prespecified objectives and the strategy
alternatives for the problem at hand (Michalowski and Szapiro 1992). These
methods explicitly incorporate the knowledge and expertise of different participants
by making use of their objective and subjective judgments as direct inputs
to the multicriteria model. Multicriteria analysis is based on the three principles
of (1) problem decomposition into a structured framework, (2) relative comparison
criteria and alternative decisions, and (3) synthesis of the priorities and
ranking of the alternatives.
Conceptual framework. Figure 1 summarizes the conceptual framework for this
research. The research methodology is focused on defining the integrated natural
and human system associated with the aquaculture environment. The descriptive
input system defines the data for the GIS model in order to evaluate the environmental
interactions at alternative marine sites. The site evaluation procedure is
used as input to the multicriteria decision model. The model is constructed
for all key participants in the decision making process to provide an indication
of the relative importance of alternative marine sites to these participants.
The resulting information is crucial to negotiating a consensus in the governance
of public policy development.
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Rationale for this study. The principle challenges of aquaculture come from
learning to integrate and synthesize system change: (i) natural change -from
the ecology and habitat of the affected ecosystems, to the spread and impact
of induced toxicology, and (ii) human change -from the impact on traditional
users of the marine environment to the governance structure of the economic,
industrial, community, non-governmental, and federal and provincial government
sectors all stakeholders in the development and application of policy. There
are trade-offs to be considered between industrial development and environmental
sensitivities. Within the Bay of Fundy, a number of interactions among different
users have already been identified, e.g., conflicts between weir fishermen
and fish farms (Stephenson 1990). Further environmental interactions are implicit
in increasingly rigorous policies and legislation, and there has to date been
insufficient consideration of cumulative impacts. This study fills a void
in work to date to assist aquaculture policy decisions by developing an integrating
framework to take account of the key natural and human components of the aquaculture
system as well as to incorporate the perceptions of different participants
in decision making.
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Objectives