Understanding and improving the environmental burden and impacts associated with producing and consuming marine products are important for enhancing the sustainability of the fisheries industries. The fisheries industries applied Life Cycle Assessment（LCA） to improve sustainability; research on fisheries LCA related to each stage and the supply chain followed. This paper clarifies the recent research trends in fisheries LCA through a literature review. First, the author organizes the relationship between the fishery products produced and the environmental burden and impact by analyzing past studies of fisheries and aquaculture. Next, from the methodological point of view, the paper finds patterns in the literature according to the elements of goals, system boundaries, functional units, allocation, environmental burden, and impact areas. Finally, the author examines the direction of future efforts based on the gap between the current situation of fisheries LCA and the issues to resolve.

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In this paper, the authors report the Internet of Things （IoT） and its applications for the set-net fishery. The sustainable fisheries will be realized through compatibility between the sustainability of fishery resources and the sustainability of fishery management. However the total catch has been decreasing year by year, so improvement of productivity is an urgent issue. Therefore, the authors developed the cloud type echo sounder and installed it to a set-net. It is possible to visualize the inside of the set-net by creating the acoustic images from the acoustic data. In the fishing season of 2015, the fisherman learned the features of each fish by looking at the images after operation. While in the fishing season of 2016, fisherman made an operation plan by looking at the acoustic images before operation. As a result, on the other hand consumption of fuel in 2016 decreased by 3.2% compared to 2015, the total catch increased by 32.3%. Therefore, IoT contributed to improvement of productivity and reduction of CO₂ emissions. Nowadays, the authors have been working on the creating big data of set-net fishery. In the near future, artificial intelligence will predict the catch of tomorrow and the set-net fishery can be sustained.

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Over the last decades, the fishery production has increased remarkably as the global demand expands. As a result, fisheries resources in many areas are now shows a downward trend. To cope with this situation, the methods of fishery resource management have made great progress both in system and technology under the policy of how to catch fish maintaining reproduction. However, in recent years the enlargement of processing volume and distribution range has increased the necessity of considering the environmental impact of fishery such as energy consumption and waste on sea as well as land. With this situation, the updating of management concept has been discussed and the research on aquaculture and fishery using LCA is gradually increasing after 2000. Furthermore, in recent years, the possibility of evaluation of comprehensive environmental impact to marine ecosystem including fishery resources are mentioned. This article presents various problems of fishery and shows discussion on the status of fishery LCA studies.

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There are not so many LCA studies on food products, in general, and there are especially few studies on fishery products with taking distribution process into account. The objective of this research is to evaluate the life cycle CO₂ emission of squid taking account of both fishery and distribution. Because squid are consumed in various ways and those have strong relationship with fishery and distribution method, of course with environmental load. For example, ikezukuri (sashimi made from living squid) is made from the squid caught by squid jigging fishery and transported by live fish transportation. We calculated CO₂ emissions of the squid that landed at Hachinohe fishing port in Aomori prefecture and transported to Tsukiji market in Tokyo with various fisheries and transporting methods. As a result, live fish transportation and squid jigging fishery have an extremely large impact on LC-CO₂, and contrarily, frozen transportation and fixed net fishery have small LC-CO₂. Especially for frozen distribution, LC-CO₂ with assuming various distributing conditions were calculated. The relationship between the calculated LC-CO₂ and the quality of squid that can be predicted by the condition of each process of distribution was discussed. It is suggested not only environmental load but also the food quality should be taken into account to develop really sustainable squid supply chain.

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