The Norwegian aquaculture industry has a complex regulatory regime with many different stakeholders, and multiple authorities that have different auditing approaches and focus areas. 

For fish farm operators this is constraining and makes it challenging for them to demonstrate control towards the different regulatory regimes and to focus resources on the barriers that have the largest impact on securing production success. 

Consequently, operators are experiencing poor alignment between governmental audit schemes, with no transparent methodology for systemizing audit findings or enabling cumulative insight for the betterment of the industry as a whole. 

Regulatory harmony 

AquaInsight^TM is a set of interactive dashboards developed by DNV to support authorities and operators in the Norwegian aquaculture industry. Each dashboard provides visualizations of a database of relevant public audit reports, public regulations, and industry-specific standards. 

DNV has analysed public audit reports from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, the County Governor and the Norwegian Food Safety Authority, applying analytics to look at trends and focus areas from auditing activities performed by the government. This gives an overview of audit types and topics and of the applied regulations, as well as detailed descriptions of documented non-conformities and improvement areas. 

The platform also includes a structured overview of two of the industry specific standards, the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and Global Good Agricultural Practices (GGAP). This feature allows the user to easily navigate between the different sections of the standards and assess the requirements. 

AquaInsight can also be used by fish farmers to prepare for regulatory auditing activities by learning from the regulators’ comments and focus areas. 

The benefits 

From an industry perspective the tool provides a better overview of different regulatory regimes for the industry and their interlinkages. 

From the regulatory perspective, AquaInsight provides a holistic overview of the legal and thematic coverage from various auditing authorities. In addition, the tool helps auditors to prepare and learn from the audits, hence increasing efficiency and effectiveness. It also highlights the most pressing issues in the industry, enabling risk-based audits. 

AquaInsight also benefits the retailers and consumers as the tool promotes value chain transparency and provides benchmarking and spatial and temporal trending of the auditing results.