Regulating a ‘fish out of place’: A global assessment of farmed salmon escape policies and frameworks

Our paper aims to contribute to scholarship on the role of policy in regulating aquaculture development globally. We focus on the rapid rise in regulatory frameworks for farmed salmon escapes across 14 global production regions. Escape policies and frameworks aim to address a critical area of environmental concern for salmon aquaculture: the environmental, ecological and social impact of farmed salmon escapes into the wild. Building on previous research, we provide an updated global assessment of farmed salmon escape policies. Our findings reveal a rapid rise in the spread and implementation of escape regulations globally and the development of new technologies that aim to address this problem. We assess the strength and weaknesses of the various policy mechanisms designed to respond to the problem of escapes. While policies for escaped fish are in place in all production regions, we argue that their effectiveness is constrained by their various weaknesses and by the inevitability of farmed salmon escapes in open net-pen aquaculture.