Salmon scorecard tracks fish welfare

Compassion in World Farming’s Salmon Welfare Scorecard aims to encourage transparency across the supply chain, rewarding better policy and practice and in turn improving welfare conditions for farmed salmon.

“The Salmon Welfare Scorecard is a valuable tool for encouraging greater awareness, transparency and investment in higher salmon welfare,” said Compassion in World Farming’s global chief executive, Philip Lymbery.

“I look forward to seeing increasing progress on fish welfare as a result of engagement with this scorecard initiative, an approach that we intend to also apply to the farming of other fish species.”

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, more than a half of seafood consumed is farmed. Salmon is one of the world’s most popular fish with more than 400 million raised globally each year. Criticism has long been levelled at the aquaculture industry for its alleged failure to ensure adequate welfare standards.

Scorecard

The scorecard evaluates the public policies of AquaChile, Bakkafrost, Cermaq, Cooke, Grieg Seafood, Leroy, Mowi and Salmar which together represent more than half of worldwide salmon production.

It rates the companies across 13 welfare parameters including stocking density, humane slaughter, sea lice infestations and mortality.

All the producers were consulted about the original findings in March 2023 and given the opportunity to improve their scores prior to publication.

The scorecard will be updated again next year with additional producers planned for the November 2024 iteration. After this the scorecard will be published biennially.