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The origins of aquaculture feed ingredients matter more than composition for aquafeed environmental footprint assessments

Nature Food (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

The net environmental implications of shifting aquaculture feed provisioning from wild-caught fishmeal to crop-based ingredients remain understudied, with little attention paid to multiple environmental pressures or the importance of where ingredients are sourced from. Here we model the change in environmental footprint (a cumulative and spatial measure of greenhouse gas emissions, habitat disturbance, excess nutrient and water consumption pressures) of shifting dependence from largely fish-based to plant-based ingredients in feeds for Atlantic salmon farming. We show that average differences exist between feeds in their cumulative and individual environmental pressures, but more importantly, the locations where feed raw materials are produced and processed drives far more variability in footprint within a feed than the typical variation between feeds. We demonstrate that responsible sourcing will be critical for sustainable feed production across all farming systems as the next generation of ingredients is developed.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of methods used to estimate the environmental footprints of salmon aquaculture feeds.
Fig. 2: The origins of raw materials mediate the environmental footprint of different Atlantic salmon feeds.
Fig. 3: Variability of cumulative environmental pressure from fish-dominant and plant-dominant feed scenarios for Atlantic salmon aquaculture.
Fig. 4: Contribution of individual environmental pressures to variability in the CPI across fish-dominant and plant-dominant feed scenarios.
Fig. 5: Raw material origins drive substantial variability in environmental pressures from feed ingredient production.

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Data availability

All publicly accessible data are freely available at https://github.com/Sustainable-Aquafeeds-Project/feed_pressure_mapping. Large data files are available from figshare via https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29828360 (ref. 70). We are unable to make life-cycle analysis data containing per-unit pressure information publicly available and this should be obtained from the corresponding author to run the full analysis. We detail instructions on how to obtain these data and maintain correct file paths for the code in the Github repository ReadMe file. Source data for all figures are provided in the online version of this article. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

All code used in this analysis is available at https://github.com/Sustainable-Aquafeeds-Project/feed_pressure_mapping. Please follow directions for use in the ReadMe file. This repository should be cloned from Github and run in the R project to ensure file paths are functional.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP200100404 ‘Optimising aquafeeds to support ecosystem-based management’ (R.S.C., J.L.B., S.S.P., G.C.). G.C. is supported through an Australian Research Training Program Scholarship and the UTAS-CSIRO Quantitative Marine Science Program. B.S.H. and G.C. also received support from the Zegar Family Foundation. X.Z. is supported through Destinations Australia and a Tasmanian Graduate Research Scholarship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Richard S. Cottrell, Gage Clawson, Louise Adams, Chris G. Carter, Scott Hadley, Alexandra Johne, Catriona Macleod, Sowdamini Sesha Prasad, Xintong Qiu, Camille A. White, Xin Zhan & Julia L. Blanchard

  2. Centre for Marine Socioecology, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Richard S. Cottrell, Gage Clawson & Julia L. Blanchard

  3. Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Richard S. Cottrell

  4. National Center for Ecological Analysis, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Benjamin S. Halpern & Gage Clawson

  5. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Benjamin S. Halpern

  6. BioMar Group, Aarhus, Denmark

    Marceau Cormery & Helen A. Hamilton

  7. Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Beth Penrose & John P. Bowman

  8. Research Institute for Northern Agriculture, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

    Beth Penrose

  9. Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Duncan D. Cameron

  10. Biomar Australia, Wesley Vale, Tasmania, Australia

    Tom Fox-Smith

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Contributions

R.S.C., J.L.B, B.S.H., H.A.H. and M.C. conceptualized the work. R.S.C., B.S.H, J.L.B. and B.P. developed the methodology. R.S.C., H.A.H., M.C. and G.C. contributed the data products needed for analysis. R.S.C. and M.C. conducted analyses. R.S.C. and G.C. produced the figures. All authors provided feedback to conceptual and methodological refinement, and provided edits for the paper. J.L.B., B.S.H., C.M., C.G.C., D.D.C., L.A. and J.P.B. acquired the broader project funding.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Richard S. Cottrell.

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Competing interests

R.S.C., J.L.B., B.S.H., B.P., L.A., D.D.C., C.G.C. and C.M. acknowledge a relationship with Biomar Group via their role as industry partners on Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP200100404. L.A. and C.G.C acknowledge a relationship with Skretting via the Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre supported under the Australian Government’s CRC Program, grant number CRC-20180101. H.A.H., M.C. and T.F-S. acknowledge employment with Biomar Group. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Food thanks Markus Langeland, Brandi McKuin, Michael Tlusty and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–11 and Tables 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Tables

Supplementary tables holding data on: the drivers of embodied fish demand, greenhouse gas emissions from fishing activities in different marine regions, partitioning and raw material conversion factors for agricultural and marine ingredients, and process names used in Agri-footprint for environmental pressure estimation.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2a

Raster file underpinning Fig. 2a.

Source Data Fig. 2b

Raster file underpinning Fig. 2b.

Source Data Fig. 2c

Raster file underpinning Fig. 2c.

Source Data Fig. 2d

Raster file underpinning Fig. 2d.

Source Data Fig. 2e

Raster file underpinning Fig. 2e.

Source Data Fig. 2f

Raster file underpinning Fig. 2f.

Source Data Fig. 3

All iterations of cumulative environmental footprint per diet underpinning Fig. 3.

Source Data Fig. 4

All iterations of greenhouse gas emissions, disturbance, water extraction, and nutrient pollution per diet underpinning Fig. 4.

Source Data Fig. 5

Pressure data underpinning the case studies in Fig. 5.

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Cottrell, R.S., Halpern, B.S., Cormery, M. et al. The origins of aquaculture feed ingredients matter more than composition for aquafeed environmental footprint assessments. Nat Food (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01236-6

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