To get anything close to what that used to look like would take massive reductions in consumption and production across the board. Not just shifting what type of fish people eat. Having a lot, lot less of it overall
It’s not just a higher population. Per capita consumption of fish has gone up quite a bit in the past decades, though has leveled off
Fish farms are not the environmental win they claim themselves to be. They can sometimes actually make things worse because they’ll often take wild caught fish as feed too!
The sheer quantity of wild fish used in salmon farms is also a growing concern. About a fifth of the world’s annual wild fish catch, amounting to about 18m tonnes of wild fish a year, is used to make fishmeal and fish oil, of which about 70% goes to fish farms
Environmental impact is not limited to salmon farming either. All kinds of fish farms dumps large amounts of waste into the environment
For a world annual shrimp production [in fish farms] of around 5 million tons, 5.5 million tons of organic matter, 360,000 tons of nitrogen, and 125,000 tons of phosphorous are annually discharged to the environment
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353277/
They can also drive deforestation in some parts of the world too
Conversion to aquaculture is the most prevalent driver of mangrove deforestation across the tropics over the last 50 years generating substantial carbon emissions. Preventing further aquaculture expansion within mangrove forest areas will be essential to achieve national emission reduction targets in mangrove-holding countries.
To get anything close to what that used to look like would take massive reductions in consumption and production across the board. Not just shifting what type of fish people eat. Having a lot, lot less of it overall
It’s not just a higher population. Per capita consumption of fish has gone up quite a bit in the past decades, though has leveled off
Why can’t we just make fish farms instead of taking them from the ocean?
Fish farms are not the environmental win they claim themselves to be. They can sometimes actually make things worse because they’ll often take wild caught fish as feed too!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/11/global-salmon-farming-harming-marine-life-and-costing-billions-in-damage
Environmental impact is not limited to salmon farming either. All kinds of fish farms dumps large amounts of waste into the environment
They can also drive deforestation in some parts of the world too
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.14774