Seaweed is thought to offer a sustainable alternative to land-based agricultural expansion to meet the world’s growing need for food and materials.
“Seaweed has great commercial and environmental potential as a nutritious food and a building block for commercial products including animal feed, plastics, fibres, diesel and ethanol,” said PhD candidate Scott Spillias.
“Our study found that expanding seaweed farming could help reduce demand for terrestrial crops and reduce global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by up to 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year.”
The researchers mapped the potential of farming more of the 34 commercially important seaweed species.
They estimated the environmental benefits of a range of scenarios based on land-use changes, GHG emissions, water and fertiliser use, and projected changes in species presence by 2050.
“In one scenario where we substituted 10 per cent of human diets globally with seaweed products...