Sjókovin at the North Atlantic Seafood Forum

This week, the conference, The North Atlantic Seafood Forum, was held in Bergen, Norway. The conference gathered around 1,000 stakeholders from the fisheries and aquaculture industries from across the world.

Sanna Laksá presented as part of a session on technology and whitefish. The session focused on the latest technologies, new ideas, and sustainable development within the whitefish sector, both in fisheries and in production as a whole. Participants gained insights into how workflows can be improved, how environmental impacts can be reduced, and which market trends are shaping the future of the whitefish industry.

Sanna presented how fuel consumption in the Faroese fishing fleet can be reduced, based on findings from two of Sjókovin’s projects, SmartFisk and MeCCAM. Sanna highlighted results from the SmartFisk project, including the importance of access to the right fishing grounds. For example, she showed that twice as much mackerel can be caught in British waters compared to Faroese waters per liter of fuel used.

Sanna also explained the plans within MeCCAM to combine data on catches, fish quality, fuel consumption, and production in order to better understand the relationships between these factors. This will make it possible to estimate the economic and environmental costs when coastal states fail to reach satisfactory agreements on fish stocks. These calculations will be used as a basis for providing advice on the management of migratory fish stocks...

Emphasis was also placed on the importance of accurate knowledge about fuel consumption, as fuel use represents the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the Faroe Islands, as well as a major part of the total costs in the fishing industry. Fuel consumption therefore has a significant impact on both sustainability and the economic viability of the sector.