Highlights:

With its ability to sink carbon, sustain marine biodiversity, employ women, and unlock value chains, seaweed farming demonstrates how development, climate, and nature work together to generate value and uplift communities.

Seaweed farming can help build a world free of poverty on a livable planet and has enormous growth potential. This report has identified ten global seaweed markets with the potential to grow by an additional USD 11.8 billion by 2030.

Today, most farmed seaweed is used for direct human consumption, as fresh feed in aquaculture, or as hydrocolloids. However, seaweed-farmed products may be able to displace fossil fuels in sectors such as fabrics and plastics; can provide ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration and nitrogen cycling; and can generate socioeconomic benefits in fragile coastal communities.

Further, the market is currently dominated by a handful of Asian countries, which produce 98 percent of farmed seaweed by volume globally. Opportunities for growth in new regions and applications are high. The Global Seaweed New and Emerging Markets Report 2023 provides an analysis of the commercial opportunities for new high-growth seaweed market applications that could increase the scale of seaweed cultivation and enhance value-added seaweed processing.

The report focuses on 10 relatively new and emerging seaweed applications that have the greatest market opportunities outside the established agar, alginate, carrageenan, food and aquaculture feed sectors.

It examines the ecosystem service side of the seaweed sector, providing case studies from emerging projects, along with predictions relating to whether – and how – these services could one day be monetized.

Key Findings

• The most promising short-term markets for seaweed (beyond conventional market applications) are biostimulants, animal feed, pet foods, and methane-reducing additives.

• Nutritional supplements, known as nutraceuticals, alternative proteins, bioplastics, and fabrics offer medium -term opportunities.

• Pharmaceuticals and construction offer long-term opportunities.

• To fully realize its potential, the industry will need to overcome several key issues, including the availability of seaweed, pricing challenges, and regulatory barriers.

• The climate and environment benefits of seaweed farming will help drive growth as interest in “green” products continues to increase. Overall, a major driver for most of these potential emerging markets is the “green” benefits of seaweed, and many product developers have expressed a reliance on sustainability premiums to generate profits.

• Ecosystem services offering environmental benefits can boost green economic growth potential. The current focus for seaweed cultivation is provisioning services, which relate to material benefits produced by natural ecosystems that can be extracted directly from nature to meet basic human needs. However, macroalgae provide a range of other ecosystem services that moderate, regulate, or support the natural world that have not been fully commercialized or leveraged. Multiple organizations have submitted proposals for blue carbon credits using seaweed. Several stakeholders suggested that biodiversity enhancement could become one of the more important ecosystem service attributes of seaweed farming and restoration over the next decade.

Conclusion

The seaweed sector has clear growth potential beyond its current markets and can help shape a world free of poverty on a livable planet. Enhanced seaweed production and improved value chains can contribute to meeting at least nine of the 17 U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For example, seaweed farming can sink carbon, sustain marine biodiversity, and employ women. At a time when global resources are increasingly overstretched, it is particularly important that the world makes the most of those resources – such as seaweed – that can both be swiftly regenerated and potentially help to regenerate the ecosystems that support them. Seaweed farming in new markets and with new applications can support development, climate, and nature work to generate value and uplift communities.