SUSTAINABILITY 58 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE February 2024 By addressing the welfare of these sentient beings, nations and producers can forge a transformational path towards a more sustainable and equitable future, in line with the principles and interconnectedness of the 2030 Agenda. This article highlights ten priority areas in which aquatic animal welfare serves as a cross-cutting solution to many of the sustainable development challenges we face today.. We at Aquatic Life Institute have identified ten key areas where aquatic animal welfare is at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals. FEED COMPOSITION, AS RELATED TO SDG 2, 12, 13, 14 While feed in aquaculture has improved dramatically over the past 2 decades to require less wildcaught fish, aquaculture is still heavily reliant on wild fish in current fish feed composition. Aquatic Life Institute’s report, “‘Blue Loss’ and Measuring the Hidden Animals in Our Food System,” examines how many aquatic animals are unaccounted for in the human food chain each year. Aquaculture is often touted as the solution to overfishing, yet the study found that up to half of all animals caught at sea are fed to fish on farms. This poses serious questions about aquaculture’s animal welfare paradigm, as trillions of fish are processed, or fed live, as fish feed in order to produce the billions of fish that end up on the human plate. Without major improvements to feed composition and techniques, the future of the entire fisheries industry as well as global food security is at stake. SOLUTIONS: A. We urge for a coordinated effort to improve feed composition through research and innovation to ease pressure on wild fish populations. B. Producers must move toward the use of alternative, plant-based feed products where possible, and higher feed efficiency ratios (e.g. less animal-derived ingredients) to the extent that the evidence suggests this will not have a deleterious impact on the health and wellbeing of the fish, nor the ecosystem. C. Shift from carnivorous farmed species to herbivorous or omnivorous species, extractive species (e.g. bivalves or algae), and systems where animals and their feed are co-produced and are fed a more herbivorous diet. WATER QUALITY, AS RELATED TO SDG 6, 14 Poor animal welfare resulting from high stocking density and inefficient feeding can cause toxic wastewater in fish farms. Left untreated, it can de-
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