Seaweed resources, collection, and cultivation with respect to sustainability

Abstract Seaweed utilization, wild harvesting, and cultivation have played an important role in many coastal communities all around the world for centuries. Seaweeds have been used traditionally for food, medicine, or animal feed and fertilizer. Nevertheless, over the last decade, we have observed a strong emergence of seaweed use with many novel applications used in the food, ingredients, and nutraceutical industries; cosmetics, health, and wellbeing industries; to biofuels and bioplastics. Of the circa 10,000 species globally, only a handful are commercially utilized in the seaweed industry, and even less are commercially harvested from wild capture or cultivated in a large scale. With a growing interest in using seaweeds as a renewable sustainable resource, it is vitally important that seaweeds are sustainably utilized, and that natural resources are effectively managed by coastal communities with vested interests around the world. Several aspects of sustainable use of seaweed resources are discussed in this chapter.