Asia has experienced rapid growth of aquaculture in the past four decades and this has significantly contributed to an increased supply of fish products for improved nutrition of the Asian people. It has also strongly benefitted the global seafood trade, local livelihoods and overall economic development. Being a relatively new food production sector of industrial scale, aquaculture has been developed in the region, in many cases, without good planning and management. This has caused immediate threat and emerging risks to its sustainability in the long term. With population growth and changes in people’s dietary habits as the result of improving living standards, it is anticipated that the global demand for food fish will increase significantly in the coming decades. Sustainable growth of aquaculture is considered as the most feasible approach to meet this increasing demand. But, it is very difficult to imagine Asian aquaculture achieving sustained growth without significantly improved planning and management.

In order to support the member countries in the region to achieve sustainable growth of aquaculture through improved planning and management, FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific implemented a regional TCP project “Pilot application of aquaculture planning and management tools for sustainable growth in selected Southeast Asian countries” (TCP/RAS/3511) from May 2016 to December 2017. The regional TCP project was implemented in three selected ASEAN member countries, namely Indonesia, Thailand and Viet Nam, which covered a range of project activities at regional and country level. The project focused on the development of technical manuals for the aquaculture planning and management tools prioritized by the participating countries, awareness raising and technical capacity building for application of the aquaculture planning and management tools, pilot application of four selected aquaculture planning and management tools in the project participating countries and sharing of the project results for scaling up.

This document is an important product of the project implementation and consists of three components: a summary report on the overall implementation of the project at regional and country level; the individual summary report on implementation of project activities in the three participating countries; and technical manuals of four prioritized aquaculture planning and management tools. The overall project implementation report introduces the major regional and country level project activities implemented under the project and the major outputs delivered. It also summarizes the major achievements of the project and the important lessons learned in the general implementation of the project. The individual country implementation reports summarize the implementation of major project activities in Indonesia, Thailand and Viet Nam. The country reports focus more on the piloting of selected tools in each individual country, particularly the process, major results and the lessons learned. The country reports also include recommendations for scaling up the application of aquaculture planning and management tools at country and regional levels. The technical manuals for the four aquaculture planning and management tools, namely environmental carrying capacity assessment, feasibility study, farm biosecurity planning and aquaculture traceability, cover the tool concept, methodology and practical guidance for their field application.

The hope is that the production of this document will help to scale up the results of the project for wide application of the aquaculture planning and management tools in the region. The document is expected to serve as a knowledge product and to provide practice guidance to a wide range of readers, including but not limited to aquaculture planners and managers, researchers and extension workers and farmers, who are engaged in aquaculture planning and management at different levels.