“WWhat would Norway be without fjords and mountains?” asks Ann-Britt Bogen from her candlelit kitchen, the wild river Gaula flowing past outside the window, the hills covered in low-hanging clouds. For centuries, the river, which flows 153 km (95 miles) from the mountains near the Swedish border to the Trondheim Fjord, has attracted salmon – and fishermen – year after year.
But this spring, salmon, especially medium-sized and larger fish, failed to return from the sea. This sparked such great concern about the collapse of the salmon population that the river, like dozens of others in central and southern Norway, was abruptly closed for the first time.
Visitors canceled their plans and stayed away. According to Bogen, who runs the Gaula Fly-fishing Friends and a fishing cabin on her family farm, people in the salmon-fishing area felt “like the end of the world.” The river will now remain closed until the end of the season on August 31. “Without salmon, Gauldalen is just a valley – an empty valley.”
Scientists have been warning for years about the rapid decline of salmon populations in the North Atlantic. In Norway, salmon numbers have fallen from more than a million in the early 1980s to about 500,000, a decline largely due to the climate crisis. Now, the latest figures show that Atlantic salmon stocks are at an all-time low. Experts say the species is under immediate threat from salmon farming, which has led to outbreaks (including sick fish) and a dramatic increase in sea lice, and could lead to wild salmon being completely replaced by a hybrid species.
Torbjørn Forseth, a salmon researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) and chairman of the Norwegian Scientific Advisory Committee for Atlantic Salmon Management, says wild Norwegian salmon could become extinct.
“We are replacing wild salmon with escaped farmed salmon,” he says. “That is a major threat in the long term because then all local adaptations are lost.”
Each of Norway’s 450 salmon rivers has its own salmon, adapted to the specific conditions of the local environment. “If this is replaced by a cross between wild and farmed salmon, something very, very important is lost.”
While the broader factors related to the climate crisis are not something Norway can do quickly, the human-caused impacts of fish farming are something that can be addressed quickly, says Forseth. He calls for a completely different approach to fish farming management, separating farmed and wild fish populations. Open net farming at sea has, in his opinion, reached its “biological limit”.
The collapse of the salmon population this year – from southeastern Norway near the border with Sweden to north of Trondheim – is something he has never seen in his 25 years as an Atlantic salmon researcher. “I’m worried about the future,” he says.
Salmon have been present in Norway for thousands of years, but the sport of fly fishing as we know it today was introduced by the English in the 1820s. The sudden closure of 33 rivers, including the Gaula, just three weeks after the salmon fishing season began in June came as a shock to many. But Bogen says she is not surprised.
“Something happened in 2023, but the decline has been evident for years and all research shows the same trends,” she says. “It’s such a decline and it’s happening very quickly.”
In her opinion, it is a political problem that requires changes in fish farming regulations and a change in the attitude of anglers, who do not have the same tradition of catch and release in Norway as in Scotland and Ireland. “It is a completely different mentality and it will take many years to change that. But if you don’t start, it will never happen.”
Henrik Wiedswang Horjen, a spokesman for the Norwegian fish and seafood association Sjømat Norge, which represents about 700 companies including fish farms, says the problems affecting wild salmon are complex and closed farming units are “much more energy-intensive”.
“We have always signalled that we take the industry’s contribution to the impact seriously and will continue to work on it in a targeted manner,” he says. “Keeping in closed units is much more energy-intensive than in open networks. A switch will bring a significant increase in energy production, which will have a significant impact on the environment.”
But Vegard Heggem, a former Liverpool player and current salmon activist with the Norske Lakseelver (Norwegian Salmon Rivers), believes salmon farming needs to move to closed systems and he wants the government to set a deadline for this, as Canada has done in British Columbia.
Consumers also need to be better informed about how their salmon is farmed, he says. “For Norway, it (salmon) is like a symbolic species for the country. It is our panda. It is simply not acceptable for us as a nation to allow wild salmon to become a museum piece – it is there, but you cannot enjoy it, you cannot touch it, you cannot fish for it.”
Norway’s State Secretary Even Tronstad Sagebakken says the environmental impact of aquaculture is strictly regulated, but adds: “The licensing and operating system we have today does not fully solve the challenges we face… With this in mind, the government is currently working on a new white paper on aquaculture, which we hope to present next spring. (It) will look for solutions that make environmentally friendly farms more profitable and a key goal for everyone.”
It may sound contradictory, but Aksel and Beate Hembre of Hembre Gård, a fishing lodge on the Stjørdal River that reopened in July after being closed a month earlier, believe that continuing fishing in the rivers is crucial to maintaining interest in the health of Norway’s wild salmon.
Aksel, whose family has owned the farm for 500 years, believes catch and release is an essential part of the solution. “It’s the most important tool we have to keep our rivers open. If we close the river, the interest of landowners and fisheries will dwindle and then no one will care about the salmon anymore.”