Aquaculture Sustainability: Developing Concepts of a Decision Support Tool for Licensing Freshwater Cage Aquaculture in Ontario

Approaches to managing aquaculture’s sustainability have traditionally focused on a relatively few, but important, environmental impact parameters. A broader and more contemporary concept of aquaculture sustainability has now evolved to include various other parameters considered relevant to those multiple stakeholder groups who may be affected by the industry and its practices. Consequently, the lead licensing agency for aquaculture in Ontario initiated a project to establish new ‘Harmonized Guidelines’ for reviewing a cage-farm site application, in an attempt to develop a ‘one-stop’ application approach, and improved licensing procedures that can accommodate the needs of multi-stakeholder assessment. A formalized, Decision Support Tool (DST) was developed to incorporate these new guidelines into an objective and transparent decision-making matrix that could be used to aid in the more efficient assessment of an application for either the establishment of a new farm site, or the expansion of an existing farm. The primary objectives for the DST development included: the provision of an ‘approved’, ‘cautionary’ or ‘refusal’ rating system for each section criteria; an overall licensing application analysis; a clear explanation of the decision and rating criteria used; clear indications on how data provided by the applicants is to be assessed; ability to address obvious licence refusal criteria early in the application process; provide documents for each section which have been developed by a multi-agency writing team to support the decisionmaking rationale; enable easy changes to formulae constants and compliance values as science improves; and finally, to develop the DST tool in an easy to use software application package. Subsequently, a DST was developed that provides ‘ratings’ for multiple areas such as water quality, operational practices, ecosystem impacts (including species at risk, fish health/habitat/communities), sediment impacts and other user conflict criteria. Specifics for each information section and potential outcomes of the decision analysis approach developed here are detailed in this paper.