Fish Welfare Initiative Improves Living Conditions for Fish

Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) provides fish farmers with free water quality monitoring. Founded in 2019, FWI has already completed thousands of water quality analyses, leading to significant quality of life improvements for fish.

Note: FWI also works on research to develop new interventions to help fish. However, this review focuses primarily on FWI's direct interventions, as the impact of FWI's research is quite speculative at this point. That said, FWI's direct interventions appear effective enough that even if FWI's research efforts fail, FWI remains a strong option for helping fish.

How It Works

FWI partners with fish farmers to provide free water quality monitoring. In return, farmers agree to maintain stocking densities below a set limit, and to keep water quality above specified thresholds.

FWI's process works as follows:

  • FWI forms a partnership with a fish farmer.
  • FWI analyzes the water quality on the fish farm (at least once per month, and more frequently when issues are suspected).
  • If water quality problems are identified, FWI requests corrective action from the farmer.
  • FWI follows up to check if the water quality problems have been fixed, and advises further corrective action if needed.

Currently, FWI is partnered with over 200 farms in India, and has conducted over 8,700 water quality analyses. Overall, the stocking density agreements and water quality analyses have resulted in improvements in waters estimated to have housed over 2.9 million fish since 2019.

Note: these waters are also estimated to have housed over 1.4 million shrimp since 2019, but this estimate is highly uncertain.

Historic Cost-Effectiveness & Future Potential

Through the end of 2024, FWI's total expenditures are $2,122,778, and FWI has provided fish with improved living conditions at an estimated rate of 1.39 fish per dollar (for details on this estimate, click here).

With that being said, FWI currently dedicates a significant portion of its resources to research, allocating only 17% of their 2025 budget towards direct interventions. Thus, if FWI put more of their budget towards direct interventions, FWI could likely help many more fish per dollar.

Accordingly, we believe FWI's cost-effectiveness is likely to improve since:

  • FWI plans to shift its focus away from research and towards direct interventions in 2027.
  • FWI's research could uncover more cost-effective ways to help fish.

Note: the reason FWI is heavily investing in research is because they believe it will allow them to help more fish in the long-run through more efficient processes.

Other Work

FWI is currently working on research related to:

  • Fortifying fish feed with nutrients to improve welfare.
  • Discovering acceptable dissolved oxygen and ammonia levels for India's top two carp species.
  • Exploring opportunities for pre-slaughter stunning in India.
  • Using satellites to monitor water quality.

Additionally, FWI has trained an outside organization to conduct their own water quality testing, and is considering conducting similar training exercises in the future.

To learn more about FWI’s other work, click here.

What FWI Would Do With Additional Funding

As of March 17, 2025, FWI has a funding gap of $119,000 for their 2025 budget. Additional funding would allow FWI to remain fully operational for the remainder of 2025.

Room for Improvement

We believe FWI could improve by creating a webpage dedicated to providing links to all of their key data and spreadsheets. FWI provides a lot of insightful data, but we found it to be somewhat dispersed across FWI's website. A centralized data hub would make it easier for donors to assess FWI's impact, and could help attract additional support.

Conclusion

FWI has created measurable improvements in water quality for millions of fish at a relatively low cost. However, a significant portion of FWI's budget currently goes toward research, the impact of which remains speculative. Still, FWI's active interventions appear effective enough that even if FWI's research efforts fail, FWI remains a strong option for helping fish.

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References

References were last checked on April 27, 2025.

    6.
    FWI: Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture Data

    Note: FWI informed us that the farms they've partnered with in India are in two districts of Andhra Pradesh (an Indian state).