Aquaculture perspective of multi use sites in the open ocean: the untapped potential for marine resources in the anthropocene

This edited volume “Aquaculture Perspective of Multi-Use Sites in the Open Ocean: The Untapped Potential for Marine Resources in the Anthropocene” comes at a critical time for our planet. A 2015 article in Science updated the long-range population projections of the United Nations in 1992. In contrast to the 1992 UN estimate, the Science paper showed no stabilization of the world’s population by 2100, and that there was an 80% chance that the world‘s population, currently 7.2 billion, will reach 9.6 billion by 2050, and up to 12.3 billion in 2100. Much of the increases result from growth in Africa and Asia. Many of the nations on these two continents consume aquatic foods as their main sources of animal proteins. Accelerated demands for aquatic proteins in these regions will mean that in the future they will not export their products to Europe and North America anymore but use them in domestic markets. Adding to a projected increased demand for aquatic foods is the recent call from the World Committee on Food Security that aquatic foods from fisheries and aquaculture be included in dietary planning to fight malnutrition in low income and food deficient nations (High Level Panel of Experts 2014). Unprecedented—really shocking—ocean warming is causing the movement of temperate species north into the peri-Arctic seas and has led to the development of new fisheries, notably in the Barents Sea. For example, the Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Joint Commission allocations for cod and haddock for 2015 is 1,072,000 MT (Barents Observer 2015), nearly equal to the entire aquaculture production of the continent of Africa (FAO 2016). Alarmists of the late 2000s did overly exaggerate the global collapse of nearly all marine fisheries, and the downward trends of overfished stocks seem to be stabilizing. The recent models of Barange et al. (2014) show that by 2050 global capture fisheries will likely remain within +/- 10% of present global yields. But it is clear that the world’s oceans and large lakes