Aquaculture structures that once supported coastal livelihoods across Maluku, Indonesia, including Eastern Halmahera and the Halmahera Sea, a region renowned for its spectacular coral reefs and rich marine biodiversity, now stand damaged or abandoned. Many cages are half empty, while others have been completely destroyed by unusually strong winds, waves, strong currents and localized vortexes. For coastal communities, this is more than the loss of infrastructure. It is a reminder that climate change is reshaping our seas, and aquaculture must adapt.
Indonesia, located within the Coral Triangle, is one of the world’s leading aquaculture producers and home to extraordinary marine biodiversity, where generations of coastal communities have developed extensive practical knowledge of farming in dynamic tropical waters. In contrast, the Baltic Sea is a cold, brackish ecosystem where low salinity, eutrophication, seasonal ice and strict environmental regulations have historically limited conventional offshore finfish farming. Despite their very different marine environments, Indonesia and the Baltic Sea share a common denominator, stronger winds and increasingly dynamic sea conditions driven by climate change.
These contrasting experiences create exciting opportunities for collaboration. Indonesia offers centuries of practical knowledge in adapting aquaculture to dynamic tropical seas, while Europe contributes expertise in marine spatial planning, offshore engineering, ecosystem restoration and regenerative aquaculture. Along Poland’s Baltic coast, the rapid expansion of offshore wind farms (OWFs) is creating new opportunities for the co-location of renewable energy and low-trophic aquaculture. Projects such as ULTFARMS, funded by Horizon Europe, are demonstrating how mussels and seaweed can be cultivated within offshore wind farms, transforming shared marine space into systems that produce renewable energy, sustainable biomass and ecosystem services simultaneously. By integrating low-trophic aquaculture into offshore infrastructure, these multi-use systems can naturally remove excess nutrients, support biodiversity and improve the environmental performance of offshore developments while maintaining commercial viability. Looking further ahead, similar co-location concepts could also be explored alongside emerging wave energy converters (WECs) or tidal energy systems, creating future opportunities to combine marine renewable energy with climate-resilient aquaculture in regions such as Eastern Indonesia.
Another promising development is the emergence of Nature Credits. Unlike carbon credits, Nature Credits reward verified actions that restore and protect biodiversity. Healthy ecosystems, such as coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass meadows and regenerative aquaculture systems, can become investable natural assets, creating financial incentives for businesses, governments and investors to support biodiversity restoration while generating additional income for the coastal communities that actively protect and restore nature. In the future, if biodiversity benefits from integrated offshore wind and low-trophic aquaculture systems can be robustly measured and certified, such multi-use developments could also become eligible for Nature Credits, creating additional incentives for offshore renewable energy developers to invest in ecosystem restoration alongside clean energy production. As climate change reshapes coastal environments around the world, building climate resilient aquaculture will require stronger partnerships, shared knowledge and innovative nature-based solutions.
