In an article in Intrafish, it appears that the County Administrator in Nordland has, on his own initiative, introduced new requirements for mapping vulnerable species and topographic features around aquaculture facilities.
In my opinion, the County Administrator cannot introduce such new requirements without this being clarified with the county authority and the Directorate of Fisheries as authorities under the Aquaculture Act.
An aquaculture site must be approved according to several laws; The Aquaculture Act, the Pollution Act, the Harbour Act and the Food Act. The legislator has recognised that this is a situation that can create unreasonably complicated and time-consuming proceedings. In Section 8 of the Aquaculture Act, it is therefore legislated that the authorities that grant permission for aquaculture “are obliged to carry out efficient and coordinated case processing”. The authorities involved have taken this seriously by preparing a joint application form and a joint guide. The processing of location permits is also coordinated according to the rules in regulations on the processing of aquaculture applications.
An important part of this coordinated case processing system is the requirements for environmental investigations before a new location permit can be granted. These rules appear in Section 8-9 of the Salmon Allocation Regulations, and they are also part of the joint guide. This system is a well-established part of the industry regulation within aquaculture. The practice is that an environmental investigation is carried out according to established standards. The condition of special species and topographic features is also surveyed in cases where there is a particular reason for this based on the local conditions on the site.
In general, the development is going in the direction of increasing knowledge about the state of the seabed, and we are also getting increasingly better survey technology. A farming location will of course affect the environment around it. This means that a general duty to survey and a strict application of the precautionary principle can mean that the requirements for investigations become very extensive, while at the same time it becomes very difficult to obtain a permit. Here, the authorities must in practice weigh up both how extensive the requirements should be in terms of investigations and how strict one should be when assessing the individual locations. These are important assessments that must be made at the right management level. Such an assessment has been made jointly by all the authorities involved when preparing the coordinated case processing system for the allocation of aquaculture permits. If changes are to be made to this system, it is important that it takes place after a coordinated overall assessment by the authorities responsible for aquaculture, where the Directorate of Fisheries is placed as responsible for coordination. New requirements for investigations cannot be implemented by a county administrator’s office alone.
From the article in Intrafish, it appears that the County Administrator refers to Section 12 of the Pollution Act as the legal basis for the new requirements for mapping the state of the environment. It is correct that, through this provision, the County Administrator is given a discretionary right to set requirements for investigations. However, this discretion is limited by the statutory provision in Section 8 of the Aquaculture Act, which stipulates that the processing requirements must be coordinated, as I have explained in this article. The County Administrator cannot therefore be heard to say that he is “just following the law” when new requirements are set for investigations. In reality, he can contribute to groundless discrimination being practiced in the treatment of aquaculture locations in various parts of the country, and such discrimination is not permitted.