With ever-growing concerns over climate change, disease outbreaks, market fluctuations and other uncertainties, species diversification has become an increasingly prominent strategy for sustainable aquaculture development. Policy and planning on species diversification require a holistic, sector-wide perspective to assess the overall prospect of individually promising species that may not be entirely successful when competing for limited resources and markets. This paper examines the status and trends of species diversification in global aquaculture and establishes a benchmarking system to facilitate the comparison of species diversification patterns across countries. The benchmarking results based on the experiences of around 200 countries for three decades can provide points of reference to facilitate evidence-based policy and planning in sustainable aquaculture development. Additionally, the benchmarking system can be used in foresight analyses to help design or refine future production targets in policy and planning for aquaculture development. Indicating the usefulness of global experiences in guiding policy and planning in individual countries may motivate more efforts in strengthening global data on aquaculture. Improved global data would not only enhance the quality of information generated from the benchmarking system but also could expand the system to include more indicators.
PDF: http://www.fao.org/3/cb1550en/cb1550en.pdf
Information: Juinning Cai