Integration of Sustainability Assessment and Quantitative Risk Assessment of Aquaculture in Singapore

This project is a partnership between Nanyang Technological University, NAFTEC Food Technology Centre, and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, and is part of a bigger project about antimicrobial resistance and sustainability assessment of the aquaculture industry. The principal goal of this project is to assess aquaculture impacts on human health and the environment. The world needs a safe and sustainable food system that can feed every person every day with enough quantity and good quality. Being a small nation with limited land resource and large seafood consumption, Singapore needs to emphasize the assessment of the safety and sustainability of our aquaculture production. The interdisciplinary nature of the project focuses on food systems for safe and sustainable aquaculture development, and the development of science-based assessments as a basis for decision support for regulatory agencies and relevant industries. The aquaculture industry is associated to several environmental impacts, such as biodiversity loss, climate change and eutrophication of water bodies. Furthermore, the misuse of antibiotics for seafood production for growth promotion has resulted in an increase in antimicrobial resistance in the microbiome of the seafood, which can be an important threat for human health according to the World Health Organization. Therefore, it is important that the development of aquaculture happens in the most sustainable and safest way possible. A common tool to assess food safety is quantitative microbial risk assessment while the common tool to assess aquaculture sustainability is life cycle assessment. Both assessments when combined, are scientific decision support tools that can be used as a significant leverage to influence high-level policy making in the aquaculture industry to ensure environmental sustainability and food safety.