Numlock Sunday: Nikola Jones on the enormous potential of the seaweed rush

Photo by Oleksandr Sushko on Unsplash.

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Nicola Jones, who wrote “Banking on the Seaweed Rush” for the excellent Hakai Magazine. Here's what I wrote about it:

World production of seaweed is up to 34.7 million tonnes, six times the amount produced 30 years ago, and while historically lots of seaweed farming was in Asia — which still accounts for 97 percent of production — since 2018 production off the coasts of Alaska, Maine, France and Norway each more than doubled. Many large environmental groups back producing and consuming more seaweed, with the significant nutritional value in seaweed possibly replacing more resource intensive terrestrial farming. However, some are a little more skittish, as industrialized aquaculture has often been more complicated in practice than in theory, with mangroves being plowed down to farm shrimp and fish farms posing serious issues when it comes to disease. Still, it’s already the …