An analysis of China’s aquaculture sector for the three pillars of sustainability

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

China is the world’s largest aquaculture producer with a diverse sector in terms of species, technologies, and production environments. Production volume has grown substantially since the late 1970s, reaching 52.2 million metric tonnes in 2021. However, the Chinese aquaculture sector has also faced sustainability challenges. In this paper, we use the Aquaculture Performance Indicators to assess twelve important aquaculture systems in China and to analyze the sector’s overall performance and variations among different systems in terms of environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Among the three pillars of sustainability, environmental performance showed the highest variation among Chinese aquaculture systems. Oyster aquaculture outperformed the other systems in environmental and social sustainability, while carp aquaculture scored highest in economic sustainability. While there is a notable variation in the results by species, the Chinese aquaculture sector on average performed close to the global average in terms of triple bottoms of sustainability.