Fishing for solutionsenvironmental and operational assessment of selected Galician fisheries and their products

Resumo

Fishing is the only hunting activity which is still maintained on an industrial level to sustain worldwide food demand. Currently, worldwide fisheries are suffering a series of hazards linked to overexploitation and increasing human demand for protein, causing a wide range of environmental impacts on marine ecosystems, such as stock depletion or ecosystem disruption. Moreover, the fishing industry has grown to an extent where the environmental burdens associated with on board and on land operational activities, such as fuel consumption by vessels or wastewater generated by canning factories, are also becoming important environmental concerns. From a regional perspective, Galicia (NW Spain), the main fishing region in the European Union (EU) in terms of landed fish and economic turnover, does not escape these global threats. Additionally, Galicia supplies the rest of Spain and other EU countries with important amounts of fresh and processed seafood. The current importance of environmental sustainability has led to the development of a varied set of environmental management tools, in order to monitor the environmental impacts of human activities. Given the use of a life-cycle perspective to evaluate the environmental performance of products, processes and services nowadays, Life cycle assessment (LCA), a standardized technique for assessing the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product by compiling an inventory of relevant inputs and outputs of the product system, evaluating the potential environmental impacts associated with those inputs and outputs and interpreting the results of the inventory analysis and impact assessment phases in relation to the objectives of the study, is presented as the main environmental management tool that will be used in this dissertation. LCA has been widely developed in the agri-food sector. However, seafood analysis from an LCA approach has been limited to date to a few case studies, most of which correspond to analyses in Scandinavian fisheries. Hence, this doctoral thesis focuses on the application of LCA in seafood systems related to the Galician fishing fleet. In the first place, the wide set of fishing fleets and species that have been assessed makes it possible to give a broad range of results which are open for discussion regarding their environmental profile, as well as the supply chains that may arise after the landing of these seafood products. Secondly, a specific protocol is proposed for the implementation of LCA in combination with a management tool named Data envelopment analysis (DEA), which permits the analysis of multiple data points in order to include operational benchmarking and eco-efficiency verification together with the assessment of the environmental performance of fishing vessels. Furthermore, the sole use of DEA is proposed to assess the importance of skipper skills in terms of vessel efficiency. A third step of the dissertation deals with the quantification of discards in the Galician fishing sector, which is possible thanks to the broad representativeness of the inventory data collected, as well as proposing a specific impact category for discards to be included as a fishery-specific impact in fishery/seafood LCA studies. Finally, a similar approach to that performed for discards is used to calculate the carbon footprint (CF) of the Galician fishing sector. Moreover, this doctoral thesis proposes a specific CF calculator for fishing systems, which is discussed in Chapter 13 and is available in the annexed CD. The application of LCA to several fishing fleets in Galicia permitted the assessment of three different types of fishing gears: trawling, purse seining and long lining. In fact, the fleets inventoried include littoral, offshore and open sea fleets. The relevance of this study is increased due to the fact that to date only the open sea tuna purse seining fleet has been assessed from an LCA point of view in Spain. Detailed inventories are presented for each of the fleets assessed. Moreover, discussion focuses on the environmental comparison of the different gears, especially when more than one fleet (and gear) are targeting the same species, on the main hot spots that were identified in each of the systems analysed, on proposing a series of improvement actions to reduce the environmental burdens linked to fishing and on the inclusion of fishery-specific indicators in seafood LCA studies. When data were available certain emblematic and highly-consumed species in Galicia and Spain, such as octopus or hake, were analyzed up to human consumption, evaluating the different on land subsystems. In the current dissertation LCA appeared a suitable methodology due to its application to evaluate the environmental performance of fishing systems and their derived supply chains. Furthermore, the inclusion of certain fishery-specific indicators helped to provide a more integrated perspective to the assessment. DEA is a management methodology that permits the comparison of the efficiency of multiple units with similar collective characteristics. Its use combined with LCA has been considered suitable in fishing fleets, as a new methodological approach to link environmental and socioeconomic assessments of fisheries, in order to increase the assessment ability of both tools. The use of LCA+DEA avoids problems with standard deviations which usually arise when LCA practitioners work with average inventories. Moreover, the new approach facilitates the interpretation of the results for practitioners who deal with multiple individual LCAs for the same fishery. Furthermore, the joint application of LCA and DEA carry synergistic effects related to the link between operational efficiency and environmental impacts. Finally, the global inventory of all the fishing fleets made it possible to carry out two estimations on a Galician scale. The first one concerned discards amount in fishing activities. Results showed that roughly 60,250 t of marine organisms were discarded by the Galician fleet in 2008, representing 16.9% of the total capture. Moreover, an important percentage of discards was linked mainly to trawling vessels and, to a lesser extent, to certain long lining fisheries. In fact, this estimation may improve the assessment of stocks and help to quantify the damage that discards may have on wild ecosystems. The second insight is linked to CF calculation of the Galician fishing sector. For this particular case study, extensive and intensive aquaculture inventory data, available from previous studies conducted in Galicia, were used in order to reach a final value for the entire fishing activity in this region. Results showed that Galician fishing activity would entail 3% of total GHG emissions at a regional scale and 0.2% of emissions on a national scale in 2008, stressing the relevance of Galician fishing activity in terms of GHG emissions. Finally, CF calculator software is provided adapted to the specific characteristics of fishing systems, allowing stakeholders in the fishing business to easily calculate the GHG emissions linked to the extraction of different fishing species.