The Decibel - A cry for kelp: How this seaweed can help fight climate change

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Kelp has traditionally been harvested for food, but we’re discovering other new ways we could be using kelp as well … like in packaging, to replace plastics, or even in animal feed to reduce the methane released by cows.National correspondent Wendy Stueck went out on a kelp harvest, and tells us why kelp farming could help coastal communities’ green economies, and be used as an innovative and sustainable new material.

Hi, I'm Aneka Ramon-Welms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. That's the sound of a motorboat making its way north of Tofino, on Vancouver Island, on its way to harvest kelp. The seaweed is now being farmed in parts of Canada. It's a food, but we're discovering other new ways we could be using kelp as well, like in packaging to replace plastics, or even in animal feed to reduce the methane released by cows. And as kelp farmer Mike Williamson said,

it can also have a positive impact on the environment. Because it creates habitat, it reduces acidification, it uptakes excess nutrients and provides habitat, or sorry, sequesters carbon. The more you grow to a certain extent, the better it is for the environment. Globe and Mail national correspondent Wendy Stuke recently went out on the water to see how we harvest kelp. This is exactly what we were hoping for. This is really rough harvest conditions because the boats get blown around. I bet. And how do they keep them sort of organized?

Well, they're professional fishermen that have done this for a long time. Wendy tells us more about the many innovative uses of kelp and why some coastal communities are embracing the business of kelp farming. This is The Decibel. Wendy, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thanks, Manika. It's nice to be here with you and to talk about kelp and seaweed. So people probably have some idea of what seaweed is, but kelp is a very specific kind of seaweed. What exactly is kelp, Wendy? Kelp's a very, there are different varieties of it. The species that Cascadia grows and that I saw the harvest of is a pretty common kind called sugar kelp.

And it's brownish green in color and it occurs naturally in the oceans off the West Coast. You mentioned Cascadia there. What is Cascadia? Cascadia is based in Sydney on Vancouver Island. They're a private company and they've been around for a couple of years and they're focused on building a vertically integrated seaweed company. They only grow species that are native to that area. It's funny, when we think of farming, we don't always think of kelp farms, but you found out that they're actually really big business and production is actually happening on the shores of Canada, too. How big of an industry is kelp farming? It's growing. It's one of the interesting things about Cascadia and other companies around the world that are doing this is that they are making a distinction between sort of seaweed farming

and the sort of more artisanal sort of small scale harvesting that people have done for millennia in coastal communities. Over the last maybe 40 or 50 years, but for sure in the last 10, there's been a lot of increased interest in cultivating kelp, which means growing it from seed. It took me a while to sort of figure this out. Oh, so they go out and actually, instead of like seeding a garden or a plot of land they go out into this ocean plot and they drop weighted lines down that have kelp seedlings on it that have been grown in a nursery and those grow into kelp forests that they can later harvest. Oh and you asked me sorry how big the industry was. Some estimates have put it at around $14 billion a year in terms of market value, with that projected to grow to well over $20 billion in the next decade or so. then. That description of the seeds and the farming that happens, that's actually really

fascinating. And I know you actually got to see this firsthand, Wendy. Can you tell me, what was that like? What was that experience like? It was really cool. One of the big reasons I wanted to visit during harvest time was that Cascadias really tried to connect with the First Nations on the coast. And I cover Indigenous business stories quite often. So this is a way that First Nations are looking maybe to connect to another economic harvest potentially in their area. What was it like being out on the water? Could you smell the kelp? What's that experience like? It got very slippery.

We were in small boats, and I was with a wonderful photographer that the Globe works with quite often in Victoria, Chad Hippolito. And Chad, he wanted to see the kelp being pulled up from the water. So to do that, he had to be in the water. But it was, you know, it was a beautiful sort of misty, cloudy day just off Tofino, which if you've ever been is one of the more beautiful places in Canada, if I may say so. You're seeing this kelp come up out of the water. It's quite beautiful. It's translucent. It's browning green. And then, you know, you can rip off a chunk and chew on it.

And that was interesting, too. It was quite tasty. What does it taste like? Well, it tastes like the ocean. It's kind of crunchy. it's sort of like almost the texture for me was like oh like if you peel a really like a granny smith apple and you have that sort of it has a bit of that crunch but it was uh delicious a bit salty like i've since visiting there and reading more about seaweed one of the products that seems to be coming to the market early are sort of spiced, you know, chips or crisps. I mean, traditionally, various cultures around the world have used seaweed in food for millennia. You know, we think of sushi, of course, but there's many other ways to eat it. According to the UN, seaweed cultivation is

the most rapidly expanding sector of aquaculture. So it's a big deal. Aquaculture includes the farming of fish, shellfish, aquatic plants. So seaweed is a big part of this industry. But how else do we use seaweed, Wendy? I think that's going to be one of the really interesting things to see in the next decade or so. Right now, I would say that a lot of the product that's grown is for human consumption. But there are all sorts of markets that seaweed farmers are looking into and that's like things like pharmaceuticals cosmetics animal feed uh packaging like i just saw a seaweed packaging material that's and the advantage there would replace plastic so it's less carbon intensive and then creates less of a waste issue down the line if it's biodegradable. So there's multiple areas that seaweed is being looked at for.

And then, of course, another big area that people are looking to the potential is carbon offsets. Kelp absorbs carbon just naturally by sitting in the ocean. If you grow more of it, can you use that maybe for carbon offsets? That's sort of very early on, but that is one area that people are really looking into the potential of. So yeah, you mentioned the packaging. You also touched on agriculture feed. What about that? How would we use seaweed for that? So this was fascinating. And Cascadia has done already some research on this. So cows account for a large part of our agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions come from, you know, driving our trucks and tractors around and our fertilizers and everything else that we use to grow food.

But they also come when you're raising agriculture, cows for human consumption. Those cows digest and they're very, you know, flatulent creatures. So their burps and their farts create methane gas emissions. So the thought is, could you reduce that by the way you feed them? And so they're looking at using seaweed as an additive to their feed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. I did have a really fascinating follow-up email after my story came out saying, well, the way to really reduce emissions is to have people eating fewer cows. Fair enough. But in the meantime, if the world is growing these cattle for human consumption, what are some ways maybe to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions? It's not like you sort of cut up seaweed and feed it to the cows. It's very

processed and they add it and they are doing pretty detailed research into how much is being used, how is it being used, and how does that impact the animal in terms of weight? So it's a very interesting project that's going on. The CEO of Cascadia, he told you that the demand for kelp is high because it's a low impact material. Can you just help me understand what exactly does that mean? With seaweed, you have, you know, sunlight and ocean water, and it doesn't use pesticides. It doesn't use a lot of land base. When you think of something like, you know, even when we are trying to think now of ways to decarbonize our economy. Well, maybe we can look at wind turbines or hydro dams or solar plantations to generate some of our energy.

Well, those all have's got a footprint, but it is a footprint in an area where it grows probably anyway, and maybe can actually benefit some areas. There must be some environmental impact, though, I would imagine, of farming anything, right? Like, is there an impact on growing all of this kelp and then extracting it on the ocean itself? You know, that is one thing I kept asking Mike when we were out there on the boat is like, well, if you're ramping up this production, it's like anything else. He put it to me that in terms of sort of overall ocean area, the ocean is vast, it's big, right? So he put it that in terms of sort of overall footprint, it's small, and also the care that has been taken to not introduce outside species, that it should be benign.

But there are concerns. One of the areas that researchers and scientists are looking into is like when you're raising plants or animals, what's the biosecurity when you start trucking things around? Is it possible that you might introduce a pest or a parasite from one area? Say you pick up some parasite in a harvest area and your boat then goes to another tenure. Does that spread it around? So those are some of the concerns that are being looked at. Yes, this is a naturally occurring plant, But if you're increasing the volume of it, what are the impacts? You don't want to introduce anything bad or end up

harming the environment you hoped to benefit. There is a term called the blue economy. It's what the World Bank defines as the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth. Where does kelp farming fit into the bigger picture of Canada's plan to, I guess, manage oceans? Well, the blue economy right now is sort of one of those things that's being talked about aspirationally. We don't really know what it might look like. But the UN and other organizations have talked about, when we talk about sustainability and transitioning economies, you know, those kinds of things. Oceans are part of that conversation. The Canadian government says that, for example, that one in five Canadians live in coastal

communities right now, and ocean industries in Canada account for $30 billion a year, right? That's everything like fishing, the supportive industries around them, aquaculture. So seaweed farming conceivably could fit in there. Cascadia is very focused on seaweed fitting in to a coastal economy that struggled in the last few years as things like the commercial fishery sector has really faltered. So they see it sort of sliding into a niche there potentially. You mentioned earlier that a lot of First Nations communities are also involved in the seaweed industry here. How significant is that involvement on the BC coast? Well, I think Cascadia has tried to make a point of connecting and cooperating with First Nations, which makes perfect sense because some of Canada is subject to treaties.

Most of British Columbia is not. So when you hear the term unceded territories, that applies to most of British Columbia. And so those First Nations are exercising their rights and title, and that includes what's happening in the oceans. And, you know, BC has adopted legislation around the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that also informs this. So they might hold a tenure, right, where Cascadia says we'd want to put a seaweed farm. They might have people who can drive the boats,

be involved in harvesting. One of the really interesting conversations I had with a person from the Chuklset First Nation was he was saying that people want to stay in their home communities. They want to live and work in their home communities. So even if there's an industry that it might not be a 12-month-a-year job, but say that they can count every year on some weeks of work for harvesting. Or ideally, is this what I think Cascadia's vision is over longer term, is that a First Nation gets involved and they are the company that makes the agricultural food additive or the packaging, right? That they become involved in this economy that might, again, this is all speculative at this point,

but that might evolve from the seaweed that they're harvesting and growing now. Wendy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you. It's been a pleasure and it was fun to talk about seaweed and kelp. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wolmes. Our summer producer is Zahra Kozema. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.