From finding fuel that will sustain a fishing fleet in a remote area for a long time to finding customers willing to pay more for a carbon-free banana prawn, decarbonizing global fishing presents a host of issues, as representatives from four fishing companies discussed at the Seafood Expo Global in Barcelona in a Tuesday panel entitled Fishing Out the Carbon: How Global Fishing Companies Are Approaching Climate Commitments Decarbonization and Customer Expectations.
Nuno Cosma represents a larger enterprise than some of the others. He is the Chief Sustainability Officer for Nueva Pescanova, a fishing company, aquaculture company and processing seafood company mainly operating in Argentina, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique. The company also has aquaculture shrimp, aquaculture operations in Latin America. And turbot in Spain.
“The challenge here is that our Scope 1 and 2 (greenhouse gas emissions) are someone else’s Scope 3…. So I count on you to do your part of the reduction effort so that you can offer me some carbon, low carbon intensity seafood. The same is true for what my client is expecting from me. So I’m counting on you, my client is counting on me, and the whole supply chain is counting on some, the upper layer, to do their part of the tasks on implementing solutions and measures to reduce carbon footprint.”
Currently, though, the amount and quality of carbon calculations done in the fishing industry are all over the map. Cosma’s’ company has 700 suppliers, Cosma said, of whom only 5%-10% calculate their carbon footprint.
At a corporate level, the company began tackling carbon emissions in 2020 with a projected 3% carbon reduction annually, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2040. So far, he said, the company has exceeded its plan—reaching 39% carbon reduction when it was aiming for 30% by 2030. Several factors contributed. The company bought six new vessels which allowed them to decommission unprofitable ones and gain significant efficiencies, he said a 25% increase. The company also reduced the weight of the fishing gear by 45% in its trawl fishing operations.
Cosma contends that the trawling itself is a less significant contributor to global CO2 than the emissions burned from the vessels. But some recent research disputes that, contending that the stored carbon released from nets dragging along the seafloor pose a much bigger carbon problem than previously recognized because of the relative quantity of carbon stored there.
One of the company’s carbon solutions is planting mangroves and forests in the land it owns in South America.
David Carter, CEO of Austral Fisheries in Australia has a smaller enterprise than the others with 18 boats, three fisheries and revenues “just north of $100 million U.S. dollars.” Carter volunteered that his business consumes about nine million liters of diesel a year and produces approximately 45,000 tons of CO2 emissions.
The business has used the Australian Climate Active Standard to declare itself carbon neutral as of 2016. And currently the company is experimenting with more sustainable fuels.
“I’ve delivered two boats, with another one underway,” Carter said. “The boat that we’re about to deliver to Norway from a yard in Poland will have an additional 150 cubic meters of tank space ready for future use in methanol, internal combustion engines.”
Choosing an alternative fuel, he said, is a little like wading into a religious dispute. People have strong opinions about ammonia, methanol and hydrogen. Austral picked methanol. But making the transition, making that work with existing fuel infrastructure, calculating and offsetting carbon are still hugely challenging issues, Carter said. And the market is not always supportive of companies as they’re transitioning.
Nobody’s Asking for It
Carter told a story about taking a young sustainability influencer to try to sell a carbon neutral product to an Australian supermarket chain a few years ago. Austral had produced a “carbon-neutral banana prawn” and for the first pitch session to the buyer Carter brought along a woman in her early 20s who called herself “Climate Girl.”
“So I said, have we got a deal for you. You, need to buy our carbon neutral banana prawns,” Carter recalls. “And (the supermarket representative) said, what’s this girl doing here?” After they made the pitch the representative said: “Number one, nobody’s asking for it.” He also noted that it would not share space well in the window with other products and…if the prawn succeeded, “you’ll want more money.”
That was a few years ago and Carter said companies are making greater strides toward sustainability now, in keeping with their promises of a few years ago. Also, he said, they can’t accuse fishing companies of “making up” a premium around sustainability because now the fishers can show it’s a MSC certified product. “But,’ he said, “it’s been a long, a long slow burn.”
A third panelist Christine Penney, Vice President Sustainability and Public Affairs at Clearwater Seafoods, said their company, headquartered in Canada and focused on shellfish, is working on its internal numbers for carbon reduction.
“We’re vertically integrated,” she said. “We operate our own fleet of vessels, we have processing facilities, and we take our product through to the marketplace to our customers.” And they do not publicly disclose their carbon footprint. The company’s goals are around carbon intensity. On a per pound basis, they want to see that carbon emission per pound “flat to declining.”
A challenge is carbon accounting. “I describe this as a messy space right now. We have customers that come to us and ask us for information at a very high level. Well, can you give us your footprint? Well, sure, I can give you my annual footprint for that species, but you only take a couple of skus, or you only take them from this area versus that area.”
“You sell two shrimp products to a customer in Europe and sometimes they take cod, but they only want cod from one boat. And once you start getting into that sort of splitting, if you will, that’s the challenge on our end…. I think generally we would all agree, as long as you’re transparent about the assumptions you’re making that are defensible, well, that’s maybe the best that we can do in those really sort of gray area situations.”
One thing all the companies agreed is that while their vessels have specific needs—being offshore for long periods of time, often in remote areas—they would have to collaborate with other maritime industries if they hope to transition fuels. Having infrastructure with methanol, for example, is essential if they want to transition their vessels to it.
As moderator, Tim Fitzgerald, Chief Sustainability Officer of American Seafoods noted, “when it comes to carbon, that no one is going to solve this problem for us, and we are going to have to figure out how to jury rig it, relative to other solutions that are out there that are probably being developed for other industries that are not necessarily doing things just like we’re doing.”
