Welfare benchmarking in aquaculture provides objective data on industry conditions, enabling producers, retailers, and policymakers to track improvements and identify priority areas.
Welfare benchmarking represents a powerful tool for transforming broad welfare commitments into measurable, verifiable outcomes. Without benchmarking, claims about "responsible" or "sustainable" aquaculture are unverifiable, and consumers and retailers cannot distinguish genuinely higher-welfare producers from those making superficial claims. The challenge in aquaculture is that welfare science for many species is still developing, and some indicators — particularly behavioral ones — are difficult to measure at scale. But progress on benchmarking for salmon and other well-studied species has demonstrated that systematic measurement drives improvement: producers who know their welfare performance is being tracked and compared have both the information and the incentive to improve. Extending benchmarking to more species and regions is a priority for the aquaculture welfare field.