Aquaculture has a crucial role in food security, enabling equal access to nutritious and safe seafood products, and assuring the livelihood of millions of people.

In face of a growing world population and, alongside, the depletion of various wild fishery stocks, aquaculture's contribution to the global seafood production for human consumption is expected to further increase in the future. However, it’s sustainable expansion will be challenged in different ways, in the coming years, due to the increased occurrence and severity of climate change-related phenomena, like extreme weather (e.g. marine heatwaves) and hypoxic events. These acute and severe changes to the climate will likely push farmed marine fish species outside their thresholds of physiological tolerance, potentially compromising their metabolism and immune responses against pathogen infections. Hampered animal growth rates and increased susceptibility to disease outbreaks can translate in higher mortality

and production costs, thus, having devastating effects in the aquaculture sector. In addition, climate change effects (seawater warming, in particular) are also expected to facilitate the dispersion of diseases, prompting the spread of pathogens from tropical regions to temperate ones.

Another expected indirect effect of climate change is the increased use of pharmaceuticals/pesticides, which will be certainly required by the aquaculture sector in order to control diseases/plagues and mitigate the associated animal and economical losses. Still, this chemically-based disease management approach raises major ecological concerns:

• Introduction of pollutants in marine ecosystems
• Development of antimicrobial resistance