Sustainable cultivation of red seaweed

The project is based on a high-quality North Atlantic cooperation, which includes partners from the four regions supported by NORA, to strengthen the transition to a sustainable bioeconomy based on marine natural resources.

The team includes researchers from the University of Stavanger (UiS) (Norway); TARI-Faroe Seaweed (Faroe Island), RORUM (Iceland), and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources (GINR) (Greenland).

Dulse is a pure, healthy, and naturally occurring food, with an extremely strong marketing potential as demand is increasing. The research activity will offer attractive solutions, which will allow the utilization of dulse in a sustainable way and concurrently will support establishing profitable local businesses along the coastline of the Nordic countries across the Atlantic.

All partners will contribute to developing cultivation and cultivated biomass harvesting methods for dulse to promote the transition of the food production system towards more sustainable cultivations, with zero footprint biomass supply, no use of pesticides, antibiotics, and neutral CO₂ emissions. The cultivation of dulse is definitively an underexploited environmentally friendly production form to source a new bioeconomy and an economically profitable business. Dulse is a well-known and popular seaweed species for food, however, most of the dulce on the market is harvested from wild populations. Market demands are increasing, and the supply is not readily available due to inefficient labour demanding cultivation and harvesting methods, sporadic natural distributions, and naturally fluctuating quality products due to seasonality. To ensure high quality and sustainable production, while upscaling the production, efficient cultivation methods and good protocols that function for the different coastline areas in the North Atlantic are needed.