Increasing Industrial Resource Efficiency in European Mariculture (IDREEM) (2012 – 2016) funded by the European Union’s FP7 programme (2016)

The project has also identified they key steps that are necessary to move forward with commercial IMTA. One of these is the development of standards for defining IMTA and for establishing a certification system, that the industry can adopt and that can be understood by consumers and industry alike. Another point is to pursue a water body approach, rather than a farm-scale approach, to IMTA and to aquaculture management, in a more balanced way within a wider ecosystem, also to manage the social and environmental impacts. Furthermore, there is a need for a better understanding of technical and biological constraints of benthic IMTA, so that the deposition of waste from the fish cages could be used to develop efficient turnover of sediments and growth of harvestable product. Benthic species in an IMTA system offer the best directly measurable change in nutrient loading and are therefore a promising target for an IMTA development. Finally, we need to develop a market for aquaculture seaweed in Europe, as seaweed is a crucial component of most IMTA systems. For seaweeds to make a significant contribution to nutrient reduction they need to be grown in larger volumes than has been practiced to date.

Meeting these challenges will require a large and combined effort, through policy makers, regulators, industry and research. Once these conditions are in place, IMTA will increasingly become an important tool for the development of the economic and environmental sustainability of the European aquaculture industry.

These findings are also well detailed in the final project publication “Beyond Monoculture – Developing Integrated Multi-trophic Aquaculture in Europe”, which was released on the occasion of the IMTA session at Aquaculture Europe 2016. This short book outlines the activities, the main results and the lessons learnt during the four years of the project, covering farmer experiences, consumer responses to IMTA, social, economic and environmental results from the project.

IDREEM (Increasing Industrial Resource Efficiency in European Mariculture) was a European research project launched in 2012 to protect the long-term sustainability of European aquaculture by developing and demonstrating a new innovative production technology, Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture or IMTA. The €5.7 million project was coordinated by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) and delivered in collaboration with 14 industrial and research partners from across Europe. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 308571.