Coastal Aquaculture for Sustainable Food Security of Qatar: Preliminary Results from the Field and Laboratory Experiments

Alsayegh, S.Y.; Rosas, V.T.; Vethamony, P., and Al-Khayat, J.A., 2024. Coastal aquaculture for sustainable food security of Qatar: Preliminary results from the field and laboratory experiments. In: Phillips, M.R.; Al-Naemi, S., and Duarte, C.M. (eds.), Coastlines under Global Change: Proceedings from the International Coastal Symposium (ICS) 2024 (Doha, Qatar). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 113, pp. 885-889. Charlotte (North Carolina), ISSN 0749-0208. Coastal aquaculture has the potential to provide Qatar with a sustainable food supply to consolidate its food security, which is one of the identified national priorities of research. In this context, it is important to choose appropriate locations either onshore or coastal for the installation of a profitable aquaculture industry, keeping in consideration the weather, ecological, topographical, legal, and other requirements. Identifying suitable coastal locations involves the process of incorporating multiple criteria such as water supply and its quality, bathymetry, proximity to infrastructure, discharge of wastewater, market access, and socio-community factors. To guarantee sustainable aquaculture production, factors including coastal dynamics, coastal morphology, and anthropogenic activities also should be considered. In this work, two of the factors considered to identify a suitable location are water quality of coastal water and wastewater discharge from the aquaculture industry. The analysis of physical-chemical parameters of samples such as ionic composition, ionic proportions, water temperature, salinity, and pH show that sites near Doha onshore are not suitable for aquaculture as Ca+ in the waters is 366% higher than the seawater (control), which can have deleterious effects for some cultured species such as shrimp. Out of 10 coastal locations sampled, nine were fit for aquaculture production in terms of ionic composition, even though some of those sites could be considered hypersaline environments. Therefore acknowledging that Qatar has a wide range of species that can be cultured in high-salinity environments, it is also important to identify which species (local or exotic) would be more suitable for Qatar's food safety goals.