Landscape Approach

Making aquaculture more responsible at scale requires common goals, collective action, and continuous monitoring.

While eco-certifications and management best practices are a step toward responsible aquaculture, they often exclude small-scale producers and fail to account for aquaculture’s cumulative impacts, shared risks, and broader community objectives. To ensure sustainable growth, aquaculture management must adopt long-term, collaborative approaches that integrate ecosystems, the supply chain, climate, livelihoods, and transparent reporting — an approach that is applied at a broader geographical scale than the dominant farm-level approach.

Landscape aquaculture approaches and initiatives can:

• Achieve responsible sourcing areas
• Help protect and restore habitat
• Create  aquaculture supply chains that are more productive, resilient, and environmentally and socially sustainable
• Support farmers, other natural resource users, and communities that depend on shared resources such as land, water, and aquaculture feed ingredients
• Be achieved through the creation of landscape-level aquaculture improvement projects.

These efforts can be guided by SFP’s Framework for Sustainably Managed Aquaculture and monitored by the AIP Directory and FishSource Aquaculture profiles.

SFP, in partnership with the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), is currently trialing this approach by building a foundation for landscape-level improvements to farmed shrimp in Andhra Pradesh, India.