Climate Protection on Your Dinner Plate

Providing sustainable food for a growing global population is a major challenge: growing crops and raising livestock require massive amounts of land and energy, not to mention releasing large quantities of greenhouse gases. One alternative: cultivating algae, bivalves and other marine organisms found at the beginning of food chains. We at the AWI are investigating how this could work. 

We’re looking for flavourful and healthy foods that can be sustainably produced. In this regard, cultivating algae and marine organisms offers a range of advantages. First of all, doing so takes much less space than land-based crop and livestock farming, not to mention less freshwater. In addition, species at the beginning of food chains offer an excellent environmental balance: their production consumes less energy for feed and releases substantially lower amounts of greenhouse gas compared to e.g. beef or pork production.

However, reaping these benefits will require a great deal of new know-how. Accordingly, working together with 36 project partners from 16 countries, we’ve looked into the cultivation of these species from an extremely broad range of perspectives – such as identifying new species of sea cucumber for cultivation, or finding better and more affordable culturing systems for bivalves and algae. 

Some of these new techniques have since made the leap from theory to practice. For instance, macroalgae can now be harvested using a newly developed machine and not by hand. And progress has been made when it comes to sea urchins: whereas in the past, they could only be caught at sea, now the spiny delicacies can also be raised in land-based tanks – which means their edible eggs can now be harvested year-round, not just at certain times of year.