Managing ocean resources for the future

Today, 8.9% of the global population are hungry. That’s 690 million people, a number that has grown by nearly 60 million in the last five years and if the trend continues, will surpass 840 million by 2030. Reversing the trend is one of the most urgent challenges that global society must overcome. Developing new, more sustainable agriculture and food production methods is essential to achieving zero hunger by 2030.

AQUACULTURE

Compared to meat production, fish farming is significantly more climate-friendly. The production of one kilogram of meat generates much more CO2 than the production of one kilogram of fish. If we are to provide enough food for the growing global population, we must increase the production of farmed fish and make the industry more efficient.

KONGSBERG works closely with the company Salmar to achieve this. Together we developed the Ocean Farm 1, the world’s first digital deep ocean-based fish farm; an innovative solution to breeding more, and much healthier fish. Large enough to fit an entire offshore platform inside, with the capacity to raise 1.5 million fish annually, this state-of-the-art fish farm located 5 Km off Norway’s west coast, is paving the way to a whole new open water methodology.

The project utilises KONGSBERG’s core expertise and is the first in the world to combine marine engineering, marine cybernetics and marine biology via a 'big data' approach. Our approach to fusing all the available underwater sensors offers advanced decision support systems for the operators controlling and monitoring the feeding of the salmon and the overall physical environment of the sea, while our work on systems for the farm’s support vessels and infrastructure contributes to a highly efficient business case for a step-change in the world of aquaculture.

The sea has become the world’s largest source of protein and our dependence on seafood will only grow as the global population is predicted to rise by two billion people by 2050 – this means we will need to increase our food production capacity by 50-100%. At KONGSBERG, we focus on solutions that enable sustainability for fish farming and commercial fishing, and innovations that will meet these dramatic increases in demand.

FISH STOCK ASSESSMENT

It was widely believed before the 1960s that it was impossible to empty the sea of fish. Unfortunately, this common perception was mistaken and fish stocks all over the world dropped of massively because of over-fishing. The introduction of quotas and steadily improving tools for surveying fish resources reversed the trend over decades, and today we are approaching an optimum exploitation of stocks.

KONGSBERG technology is currently responsible for determining 80 per cent of fishing quotas around the world. But huge amounts of fish are still dumped onto the seabed, so we developed sonars that help fishermen to catch the right fish, as well as enabling the authorities to set more accurate quotas.

This work has been driven through our work with CRISP – Centre for Research-based Innovation in Sustainable fish capture and Processing technology. Together we continuously create new hydroacoustic technologies and sensors that give fishermen, researchers and the authorities a better picture of submarine life and the underwater world. With these tools, we are helping to protect and secure food for billions of generations in the decades to come.

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