AQUASMART: Leading the way in smart-tech for solar-powered, energyand resource efficient aquaculture

Description

Fish farms in remote tropical regions, such as Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, face significant challenges with limited and unreliable access to electricity and inefficient resource utilization. This leads to high production costs and limited investment opportunities in local aquaculture businesses. These obstacles have hindered the growth of the fish farming sector in Tanzania, despite the increasing demand for fish caused by population growth and declining wild fish catches.

This REPIC rollout project focuses on the commercialization of AQUASMART, an energy and resource efficiency concept for tropical aquaculture operations which has been successfully prototyped during the REPIC pilot project 'The Tanganyika Aquahub'.

AQUASMART – driven by Swiss expertise – combines machine learning, farm & photovoltaic data as well as weather forecast models to optimize the operation, management and governance of sustainable, solar powered and resource efficient tropical fish farms.

This project involving the group Aquaculture from the ZHAW is in collaboration with SUSTAIN Switzerland GmbH. It will create and set-up the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Ressource efficient Aquaculture on an open accessible online platform.