In photos: land-based aquaculture promises more sustainable seafood

In photos: land-based aquaculture promises more sustainable seafood

About an hour south of Oslo, near the mouth of the River Glomma, hundreds of thousands of salmon swim in cold, dark depths.

But they are not in the ocean or in the river. Instead, these salmon survive in enormous circular pools at a land-based fish farm in the former whaling town of Fredrikstad, where they are raised from juveniles to full-size adults.

Roger Fredriksen, the production manager at Fredrikstad Seafoods, moved to southern Norway to join the company five years ago.

“It’s been a really exciting journey because this is totally new,” he says.

And Fredriksen is not alone. Between 2008 and 2018, employment in Norway’s seafood sector grew by 10 per cent to reach 30,000.

The Scandinavian country is the world’s second-biggest exporter of fish after China, with sales increasing by 72 per cent between 2008 and 2018. By 2050, the country plans to produce 5m tonnesof salmon and trout a year, nearly five times its current volume.

Globally, aquaculture accounts for 52 per cent of the seafood eaten around the world and, since 1990, production has risen more than 500 per cent. But, while its carbon footprint is appealingly low — accounting for less than 0.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in