Outcomes from Aquaculture Europe 2022

Aquaculture Europe is one of the preeminent conferences in the international aquaculture calendar and specifically strive to promote communication among researchers, aquaculture societies, technology providers, producers, policy makers and other stakeholders. This year was particularly important for PerformFISH as it took place in a Mediterranean country and featured a strong focus on industry engagement. Aquaculture Europe 2022 was potentially the largest edition ever, with over 2,000 attendees.

PerformFISH was highly visible at Aquaculture Europe 2022, holding a full-day, 2-session symposium targeting both industry and policy stakeholders, running a centrally-located booth for both general project and work-package-specific dissemination and featuring several partners delivering presentations and attending talks relevant to their respective results.

The dedicated symposium was held on Thursday 29 September, attracting over 100 attendees. The morning session of the symposium provided the project partners an opportunity to deliver the high TRL outputs from their research to stakeholders and peer researchers. The session was organised around a series of flash presentations covering all work packages of the project. Each presentation focussed on delivering high-TRL, high-impact knowledge in such a way as to make clear their relevance for industry users.

The afternoon session was run as a foresight exercise within the context of the European Green Deal and the new strategic guidelines for a more sustainable and competitive EU aquaculture sector from 2021-2030. This overarching topic was divided into three headlining sections in the afternoon focussing explicitly on:

• Presenting the project’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and a live demonstration of ISPRA’s KPI benchmarking system
• A panel discussion with expert stakeholders to analyse and debate the near-future challenges and opportunities within the MMFF sector and how PerformFISH outputs fit into this landscape
• Unveiling of the PerformFISH revised Code of Conduct for the MMFF sector and a discussion on its implementation within industry and policy