Energy audit and carbon footprint in trawl fisheries

Abstract

The combustion of fossil fuels is considered a major cause of climate change, which is why the reduction of emissions has become a key goal of the Paris climate agreement. Coherent monitoring of the energy profile of fishing vessels through an energy audit can effectively identify sources of inefficiency, allowing for the deployment of well-informed and cost-efficient remedial interventions. We applied energy audits to a test fleet of ten vessels, representing three typical Mediterranean trawl fisheries: midwater pair trawl, bottom otter trawl, and Rapido beam trawl. Overall, these fisheries use approximately 2.9 litres of fuel per kilogram of landed fish, but the fuel consumption rate varies widely according to gear type and vessel size. This amount of fuel burned from capture to landing generates approximately 7.6 kg∙CO2/kg fish on average. Minimising impacts and energy consumption throughout the product chain may be another essential element needed to reduce the environmental costs of fishing. Our results provided a set of recognised benchmarks that can be used for monitoring progress in this field.

Use Case on Environmental Impact Assessment in the Fish Canning Industry

“…It should be noted that studies have been carried out to determine the carbon footprint of a specific part of the carbon footprint, such as the tuna (Tan, R. 2009) or produced by a concrete task, such as the transport process (Parker, R.W.R. et al 2018) and focusing on trawl fisheries (Sala, A. et al 2022). In this regard, there are tools of generalist purpose that allow a general estimation of the environmental impact (seafoodco2 2022).…”

Fishing the waves: comparing GAMs and random forest to evaluate the effect of changing marine conditions on the energy performance of vessels

“…The selected vessels were chosen from a pool of monitored ships participating in a larger data collection activity conducted by the National Research Council (CNR), which was designed to gather data on the energy efficiency of fishing vessels and led to the production of other scientific contributions over the years Sala et al, 2022;. Since these specific vessels had the longest and most continuous time series, they were ideal for matching with several years of environmental data from the Copernicus platform.…”

Blue economy: industrialisation and coastal fishing livelihoods in Ghana

“…Recent studies have underscored the contribution of the global fisheries industry to climate change through large fuel consumption and have emphasised the substantial effects of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems (Sala et al 2022 ; Wang and Wang 2022 ; Sumaila et al 2011 ; Ficke et al 2007 ). Recent estimates indicate that worldwide fishing industry emissions increased by 28% in total between 1990 and 2011 and that fisheries produced 179 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent Greenhouse gases (4% of global food production) (Parker et al 2018 ).…”

“…Recent estimates indicate that worldwide fishing industry emissions increased by 28% in total between 1990 and 2011 and that fisheries produced 179 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent Greenhouse gases (4% of global food production) (Parker et al 2018 ). The growth in global fisheries emissions is mostly attributable to increased harvests by fuel-intensive industrial fisheries activities, which depend heavily on fossil fuels for fishing, searching for fish (trawling), and handling, including refrigeration and industrial processing (Sala et al 2022 ; Parker et al 2018 ). Small-scale fisheries also contribute to the global fisheries' fossil fuel consumption, which comprises mostly of travel to and from fishing grounds.…”

“…Recent studies have underscored the contribution of the global fisheries industry to climate change through large fuel consumption and have emphasised the substantial effects of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems (Sala et al 2022;Wang and Wang 2022;Sumaila et al 2011;Ficke et al 2007).…”