WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • MARCH 2024 35 are beginning to inquire about the total risks posed by aquaculture products. Other stakeholders require this information as well. A growing number of financial institutions and financial instruments will only consider potential investment opportunities that have this level of transparency. The buyers and sellers of feed ingredients and feed are ultimately accountable for these risks. But to date there is no system that can provide adequate risk levels to aquaculture producers. The absence of this type of risk reporting is the reason that a new ESG feed ingredient risk tool is necessary. ESG Feed Ingredient Risk Tool Grieg Seafood, a salmon farming company, had ambitions of expanding their business and production with an emphasis on approaching issues within their supply chain proactively instead of reactively. This approach sparked the motivation to analyze the ingredients in their feed, as well as the suppliers of those ingredients to assess and better understand their ESG risks. It became clear that they needed to know not only everything that was in the product, but also where it came from, how it was produced, and which environmental and social risks it was connected to. Grieg Seafood approached the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to create a tool to carry out this risk assessment. WWF contracted experts in labor and human rights, environmental sustainability, and feed nutrition to create the initial questions for a feed risk assessment tool. Grieg Seafood organized several feedback sessions with their feed suppliers to reflect the challenges that feed companies experience in sourcing ingredients. The screening questions requested information that feed companies had never been required to provide before. It proved too challenging for one salmon company to obtain the answers to these questions. Recognizing that the tool would need to be widely adopted to create demand for such information, the work was expanded to include the members of the Global Salmon Initiative (GSI), a pre-competitive platform created by the salmon farming industry to collectively address and solve shared sustainability challenges in salmon aquaculture. Together with a working group from GSI, the tool was updated to include global input, standardize the requests made to feed companies, streamline operational cost and effort for the feed companies, and make consistent comparisons across ingredients and their risk profiles. Due to the highly sensitive nature of the data being reviewed, data will only be shared directly between feed supplier and farmer (Business-to-Business) and no wider. Grieg Seafood, GSI and WWF, along with some feed companies, are refining the tool for business-to-business ESG risk analysis for individual feed ingredients in salmon aquaculture feed. The tool has the potential to support aquaculture companies’ efforts to make informed decisions on the feed ingredients they purchase. In summary, the ESG feed ingredient risk tool aims to improve accountability in feed supply chains. The goal is to increase transparency and traceability, benchmark feed ingredients and the suppliers of those ingredients on material ESG items, and reduce risk while driving improvements throughout the salmon aquaculture value chain. Additionally, the tool would inform which novel ingredients are the most promising to test and which are market ready. The tool methodology has topic areas deemed to be most relevant in understanding transparency, management systems, governance in the regions where ingredients are produced, human rights, restorative land use and biodiversity practices, fisheries, carbon footprints, circularity, pollution, water consumption, fish health and nutrition, human health and nutrition, climate change impacts and scalability. (CONTINUED ON PAGE 36)
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