Max

Troell

PhD

Associate professor (Centre associate)

max@beijer.kva.se

+46 8 673 95 32

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Profile summary

  • Aquaculture
  • Coastal ecosystems
  • Ecosystem services
  • Ecosystem functions
  • Ecosystem valuation
  • Biodiversity
  • Resilience
  • Environmental impacts and sustainability of aquaculture
  • Integrated aquaculture systems
  • Mangroves

Max Troell is a system ecologist mainly working with environmental problems associated with aquaculture

Troell is primarily based at the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics. He is also affiliated with the SwedBio programme at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

His practical fieldwork has mainly been conducted in developing countries (both tropical and temperate) and involved coastal systems as well as freshwater systems. He is currently doing work in India and Cambodia, where he studies how aquacultures allocation of low valued fish resources affect poor peoples ability to access cheep fish. In India he studies coastal fishery resources and coastal communities, and in Cambodia the Mekong fishery and rural inland communities (Sida Project).
 
A further area of interest is developing integrated cultivation techniques. This work started with coastal open-water aquaculture in Chile, and at present he is involved in works on land-based abalone farms in South Africa (Sida Project). The systems he tries to develop build on using seaweeds as biofilters, with the ultimate aim to increase environmental and economic performance.

A key question is what role these systems can play in future development of aquaculture, i.e. considering the challenges we face with limited resources and degrading environments. Also within this concept he has a minor part in a EU project where peri-urban mangroves are evaluated out from their biofiltering capacity. This work has besides studying nutrient dynamics also a component where socio-economic benefits are evaluated (including estimation of ecosystem goods and services generated from the mangroves).
 
Troell is also more generally working with ecological and socio- economic evaluation of ecosystem goods and services generated from tropical and temperate coastal systems. The latest work involved identification of goods and services from some Swedish key coastal habitats, and how to value these (SEEPA).

Since 1991 Troell has been teaching and acting as course leader for marine and freshwater ecology courses. He has regular and occasional teaching assignments on various courses (University level teaching; SU, UmeåUniv., SLU, KTH, Södertörn).

He is a course leader for PhD certificate course (Ecology and economic management, 4 cr), given by The Beijer Institute and has taught ecology in a Sida financed teaching and training programme on environment and development issues for university teachers in economics in developing countries.

Staff details

ORCID: 0000-0002-7509-8140

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Publications by Troell, Max

Seaweeds for carbon dioxide removal (CDR)–Getting the science right

Journal / article | 2024

Max Troell, Noureddine Benkeblia, Catriona Hurd, Thierry Chopin, Barry A. Costa-Pierce, Mark J. Costello. 2024. Seaweeds for carbon dioxide removal (CDR)–Getting the science right. PLOS Climate. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000377

To keep global warming < 2˚C, Almaraz et al. [1] highlight the need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food production and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide by 2050. They provided an expert analysis of the potential of terrestrial based biological methods of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), including technologies that “demonstrated high impact potential supported by peer-reviewed literature”. However, scientific...

Transforming sustainable aquaculture by applying circularity principles

Journal / article | 2023

Killian Chary, Anne‐Jo van Riel, Abigail Muscat, Aurélie Wilfart, Souhil Harchaoui, Marc Verdegem, Ramón Filgueira, Max Troell, Patrik J. G. Henriksson, Imke J. M. de Boer, Geert F. Wiegertjes. 2023. Transforming sustainable aquaculture by applying circularity principles. Reviews in Aquaculture. https://doi.org/10.1111/raq.12860

A circular economy is considered one way to reduce environmental impacts of human activities, by more efficient use of resources and recovery, resulting in less waste and emissions compared to linear take-make-dispose systems. Muscat et al. developed five ecological principles to guide biomass use towards a circular economy. A few studies have demonstrated environmental benefits of applying these principles to land-based food ...

Vulnerability of blue foods to human-induced environmental change

Journal / article | 2023

Ling Cao, Benjamin S. Halpern, Max Troell, Rebecca Short, Cong Zeng, Ziyu Jiang, Yue Liu, Chengxuan Zou, Chunyu Liu, Shurong Liu, Xiangwei Liu, William W. L. Cheung, Richard S. Cottrell, Fabrice DeClerck, Stefan Gelcich, Jessica A. Gephart, Dakoury Godo-Solo, Jessie Ihilani Kaull, Fiorenza Micheli, Rosamond L. Naylor, Hanna J. Payne, Elizabeth R. Selig, U. Rashid Sumaila, Michelle Tigchelaar. 2023. Vulnerability of blue foods to human-induced environmental change. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01156-y

Global aquatic or ‘blue’ foods, essential to over 3.2 billion people, face challenges of maintaining supply in a changing environment while adhering to safety and sustainability standards. Despite the growing concerns over their environmental impacts, limited attention has been paid to how blue food production is influenced by anthropogenic environmental changes. Here we assess the vulnerability of global blue food systems to ...

Strong and weak sustainability in Nordic aquaculture policies

Journal / article | 2022

Luthman, O., Jonell, M., Rönnbäck, P., Troell, M. 2022. Strong and weak sustainability in Nordic aquaculture policies. Aquaculture. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aquaculture.2021.737841

In this paper, we critically analyze how sustainability is considered in aquaculture policies and strategies using the Nordic countries as a case. The strong versus weak sustainability concepts are used to define and clarify what sustainability aspects are central to each state. To illustrate these concepts further, we draw on and modify four mainstream environmental discourses defined by John Dryzek and apply them to the stro...