Preview: Document type : News from the Aquatic Life Institute
Author: Aquatic Life Institute
I am pleased to announce the release of our latest report, Benefits of Aquatic Animal Welfare for Sustainability! This report highlights the intersectionality between improved aquatic animal welfare and sustainable development. More importantly, it urges all public policy-makers and other relevant stakeholders to start taking aquatic animal welfare into consideration when developing sustainable development policies moving forward.
We began working on the report earlier this year after attending several stakeholder consultation meetings held by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation to help develop new guidelines for sustainable aquaculture development. We saw first-hand that although many UN member countries agree that fish welfare is important, they still see it as a tangential concern mostly related to biosecurity threats and disease prevention; whereas we would argue that it is central to sustainable aquaculture development. Better welfare means improved animal immune systems, which fights off disease, requires less antibiotics, creates less negative impacts on the ecosystem, and ultimately improves food safety and security.
So we set out to write a report, and based on desktop research and discussions with global experts, we identified ten priority areas in which aquatic animal welfare considerations go hand in hand with global environmental and sustainability targets. This report also comes at a critical juncture: the first UN Food Systems Summit takes place this month where the whole world will be talking about how to revamp global food systems to one that is sustainable and equitable. Therefore, it is a timely reminder that aquatic animal welfare must not be left behind in our efforts to achieve the SDGs.
Moreover, this report is supported by various members from two of our alliances: the Aquatic Animal Alliance and the Coalition for Aquatic Conservation. As a unified front, we urge society and all policy-makers to take aquatic animal welfare into consideration and elevate concern for their suffering to the same level as land-based animals such as cows, chickens and pigs.
As we have blogged about before, fishes are sentient beings who are capable of feeling and suffering. I sincerely hope that this report, at a minimum, can serve as a conversation starter for the importance of aquatic animal welfare in sustainable development policies. I hope that you will have a chance to read the report and see that aquatic animal welfare is inextricably linked to ethical, environmental and social issues, and therefore should be an integral component of sustainable development policies moving forward.
You can find the summary report here and the full report here.
News item featured in SCOOP on 15 September 2021 : New Report On The Benets Of Aquatic Animal Welfare For Sustainability Released
