I have learned that aquaculture is used to compete with the global market industry of marine products and are usually placed in mangroves, but there is little knowledge and tactics to make this sustainable thereby destroying the mangroves. I want to know if there is a good middle ground to satisfy both needs.
It is a wrong trend to use mangrove soils for making shrimp ponds, that is because they are acidic in nature. Aquaculturists need to explore other avenues for sustainable practices. Off shore cage culture of finfish,crab culture in vast expanse of mudflats and seaweed culture are the other options. The only motive behind shrimp culture is the quick monetary benefit, but not sustainable in the long run as not only the inputs are costly, but most of the fish meal & fish oil needs to be imported from western countries & even that is not sustainable. Hence a critical approach to this problem needs to be focused forthright.
It is definitely a direct loss of mangroves in the past few decades. Additionally, the aquaculture ponds significantly promote CO2 emissions from the sediments. See an article about this problem as below.
Sidik, F., Lovelock, C. E. (2013). CO2 efflux from shrimp ponds in Indonesia. PLoS One, 8, e66329. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0066329
And some analyses and solutions to this problem.
Ouyang, X., & Guo, F. (2016). Paradigms of mangroves in treatment of anthropogenic wastewater pollution. Sci. Total Environ., 544, 971-979. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.12.013.
Peng, Y., Li, X., Wu, K., Peng, Y., & Chen, G. (2009). Effect of an integrated mangrove-aquaculture system on aquacultural health. Frontiers of Biology in China, 4, 579-584. doi: 10.1007/s11515-009-0056-z.
Hope it helps.
Deterioration of mangrove and other coastal areas is one of the biggest threats from aquaculture. Rather than finding the best way to have coastal aquaculture, the new trend is to look at Offshore aquaculture, or Open-Ocean aquaculture. NOAA has called it "the future of sustainable seafood" (http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/stories/2016/01/offshore_aq_qa_rubino.html). This new idea proposes that all aquaculture can be done far from land, where no mangrove (or other coastal habitat) must receive the burden.
The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) has done some very interesting work on it:
http://snappartnership.net/groups/sustainable-open-ocean-aquaculture/
https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/projects/12705
https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/featured/grimm
Hope this helps
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