FWI’s 2026 Strategy and Priorities
- Haven King-Nobles
- 12 minutes ago
- 10 min read
Summary
Our key priority for 2026 remains achieving our two-year 2026 Goal: identifying and field-testing a program in India that is cost-effective, scalable, and evidence-based enough to help fishes on thousands of farms. While we made meaningful progress toward this goal in 2025, we have not yet had the breakthroughs needed to declare a clear path forward.
In 2026, our work will focus on giving each of our most promising avenues the best possible chance of success. Specifically, we plan to:
Remote sensing: Further develop—and, if possible, complete a pilot of—satellite-based remote sensing of water quality, our most promising route to improving our farm program’s scalability.
Feed fortification: Further develop—and, if possible, complete a pilot of—feed fortification.
Existing farm program: Continue improving our existing program, with the hope of increasing its scalability.
Advance several smaller intervention tracks: Including our Improved Slaughter and Earlier Life Stages projects, where we expect to continue exploratory studies.
Outside India, we expect our work in China will center on generating applied, country-specific evidence through a field study, an industry-facing report, and deeper coordination with academic and industry partners.
As always, you can learn more about our plans in our publicly available documents:
Note that this post primarily looks ahead rather than reflecting on the year past. Our usual year-in-review post, where we reflect back on our annual progress, will be published in January.
High-Level Plan: Achieving our 2026 Goal (India)
In our 2024 strategy update, we introduced our 2026 Goal—so named because we aimed to reach it by the end of 2026. The goal is:
Have developed and validated a program [in India] that meets our minimum thresholds for cost-effectiveness, scalability, and evidence-based impact.
To briefly recap, an intervention must meet the following thresholds to qualify:
Cost-Effective: A projected impact of at least 20 fishes helped per USD.
Scalable: A realistic pathway to reaching at least 1,000 farms, with a scaling mechanism that is more efficient than scattered farm visits and whose per-fish cost declines as the program grows.
Evidence-Based: The intervention must have a resolved efficacy test, a resolved field test, and a rigorous M&E plan in place before any scale-up.
The aim of this goal is simple: to develop a program we believe is ready to scale. Our current India program—the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA)—is not yet at that level (see more below), which is why we have so far limited it to 181 active farms rather than the thousands we ultimately intend to reach.
This goal is also tied to our long-term vision. If we can build robust, cost-effective, scalable programs in a challenging context like India, we expect to be able to build them in other parts of Asia as well.
During our recent strategy retreat, we reaffirmed that the 2026 Goal remains our central focus in India. The rest of this post outlines how we plan to achieve it.
Current Progress Towards 2026 Goal
As we approach the halfway point of the period for our 2026 Goal, this is a natural moment to take stock of our progress. Our strategy for achieving the goal has been to invest in several promising avenues in parallel. While this approach does come with a cost to organizational focus, we believe the increased probability of success from maintaining a “diverse portfolio” is worth that trade-off.
In 2025, we pursued two high-level avenues aimed at meeting the cost-effectiveness, scalability, and evidence-based components of our 2026 Goal: improving our core farm program and developing new interventions via our R&D efforts.
The Development of Our Existing Farm Program, the ARA
First, we’ll discuss our farm program—the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA). The following is how this program currently performs against the three components of our 2026 Goal:
Cost-Effectiveness
Our latest estimates place the ARA at roughly 13 fishes helped per USD. This is still short of the 20 fishes/USD threshold required for the 2026 Goal.
Scalability
The ARA still lacks a scaling mechanism that is more efficient than direct, scattershot farm visits. Since water quality falls within acceptable ranges about 88% of the time (see our data tool), only around 12% of visits currently have the potential to generate any welfare impact. We also still cannot reliably identify in advance which farms are likely to experience water quality issues—making it hard to scale impact without dramatically increasing visit costs.
Evidence-Based
Assuming our ongoing outcome evaluation resolves positively (results expected in the next 1–2 months), we expect the ARA to meet this criterion. We also strengthened its monitoring and evaluation plan this year, which improves the program’s evidence base.
Overall, while we made several incremental improvements to the ARA in 2025, its major bottleneck remains unchanged: without a scalable mechanism for detecting farms in need of support, the program as it is now is unlikely to meet either the scalability or cost-effectiveness thresholds required for our 2026 Goal, and will thus require further innovation.
R&D Intervention Development
In parallel with strengthening the ARA, 2025 was also a significant year for R&D. Our aim has been to develop new interventions that could either complement the ARA or serve as entirely new candidates for the 2026 Goal. The main intervention tracks we explored were:
We made progress across each of these areas, though to varying degrees. Still, we did not achieve any breakthroughs this year, and none of these interventions are yet on track to meet the 2026 Goal thresholds. We discuss our progress on each—and where we plan to take them in 2026—in the Key Priorities section below.
Overall Reflections on the Likelihood of 2026 Goal Attainment
Given that (a) the ARA still lacks an obvious pathway to improved scalability, and (b) our remaining interventions remain in early-stage R&D and carry substantial uncertainty, there is a possibility that we will not fully achieve our 2026 Goal on time. In particular, it is moderately likely that we will not have completed a full pilot of any promising intervention by the end of 2026—a key requirement for an intervention to count as “evidence-based.” That said, we hope and expect to have at least begun a pilot by then.
We are more confident about the strategic implications of success: it would likely mean (a) shifting the majority of our resources—perhaps 90%—toward scaling our work in India, and (b) beginning early exploration of launching in a third country.
By contrast, the strategic implications of failure are less clear. Much depends on the magnitude of the shortfall: a delay of a month looks very different from a scenario where most of our 2026 R&D work yields inconclusive results.
As it was last year, our public commitment continues to be to seriously re-evaluate our organization in the event of failure.
Key Priorities for 2026
Our key priorities for 2026 are primarily focused on achieving our 2026 Goal. We also include our priorities for China here, since the China team operates under a different goal-setting framework and requires separate strategic planning. Internally, each of these priorities is broken down into specific goals, which can be viewed in our publicly available and regularly updated Objectives and Key Results sheet.
Below, we walk through each of our major priority areas in turn:
Research & Development (India)
Our R&D work in 2026 will focus on developing and validating new interventions that could either strengthen the ARA or serve as independent candidates for future program development.
The main intervention tracks we will continue advancing are:
Remote Sensing of Water Quality
Feed Fortification
As secondary priorities, we also plan to continue investing in our Improved Slaughter project and to run several smaller exploratory studies. This includes continuing our Earlier Life Stages project, where we expect to investigate welfare conditions in fish hatcheries.
Remote Sensing of Water Quality
Our most promising avenue for improving the scalability of the ARA is satellite-based remote sensing of water quality. Instead of requiring our staff to proactively visit every program farm, this technology would allow us to identify only those farms experiencing water quality issues—dramatically increasing scalability and cost-effectiveness.
The central challenge is technological. Predicting water quality—especially non-optical parameters like ammonia, dissolved oxygen, and pH—from satellite imagery is inherently difficult. And while satellites have been successfully used to detect plankton blooms in the ocean, we are not aware of any group that has achieved reliable predictions in pond-based aquaculture.
In 2025, we pursued multiple avenues to test feasibility, including two innovation challenges, but none produced models that met our accuracy thresholds. Our next—and likely final—effort is to build this technology in-house by collecting a large, high-quality dataset through our Data Campaign. If this effort also fails, we will likely conclude that satellite-based remote sensing is not currently feasible for our programs.
We launched the Data Campaign in November 2025, and expect it to run for 2–3 months. We anticipate having an update on the status of this intervention in the first quarter of 2026.
Feed Fortification
Unlike remote sensing—which aims to improve the scalability of an existing intervention—feed fortification is an entirely new intervention track. The idea is to work with feed mills to produce nutritionally fortified feed that could improve both the welfare and growth of Indian major carps, while also reducing water quality issues.
In 2025, we completed the analysis of our 2024 efficacy trial. Unfortunately, the results were inconclusive, meaning we could not determine whether fortified feed had a meaningful positive impact on fish welfare. We spent the remainder of the year setting up our new R&D facility (we were required to vacate the previous one for external reasons) and planning our next set of studies.
Looking ahead to late 2025 and 2026, we are preparing three feed-fortification studies:
Two tank-based studies:
One evaluating the impact of fortified feed on welfare and growth
One evaluating its impact on water quality
One field-based study:
Comparing fortified feed to DORB under real-world farming conditions
More details can be found in our recent post.
As always, a conclusive negative result in any of these studies—for example, if fortified feed does not improve fish welfare—would lead us to cease development of this intervention.
Programs (India)
Our Programs team is responsible for implementing our interventions at both the pilot and scaling levels. In 2026, their priorities will include:
1. Continuing to run and improve the ARA
We plan to onboard roughly 25 additional farms, primarily to maintain the program at its current size and offset expected dropouts. The focus will be on improving program delivery, refining farmer engagement, and preparing the ARA for potential future scaling—should a scalable mechanism become viable.
2. Completing our Outcome Evaluation
As noted above, we are currently running an outcome evaluation to assess how successfully the ARA improves water quality in practice. We expect to complete this evaluation in the first few months of 2026, and the results will play a major role in determining the future of the ARA.
3. Piloting new programs
If either feed fortification or remote sensing demonstrates positive results, the Programs team will take the lead on piloting these interventions. This will involve on-farm implementation, farmer training, and building the operational infrastructure needed for early-stage pilots.
4. Scoping new regions
We plan to scope four new regions in 2026. This will help us (a) understand how average welfare conditions vary across geographies, and (b) identify suitable locations for future R&D studies and possible program expansion.
Monitoring and Evaluation (India)
In addition to the ongoing M&E conducted within the ARA team, we plan to establish a small, semi-independent Monitoring and Evaluation team in 2026. This 1–2 person team will focus on applying our Welfare Assessment Protocol to better understand welfare conditions both on ARA farms and on farms outside our program, across multiple regions. This work will help strengthen our evidence base, guide future program design, and inform where new interventions may be most impactful.
More details on this can be found in our recent post.
Policy (India)
To date, our policy work in India has focused on engaging both central and state governments to encourage policies that support improved fish welfare. However, we are currently re-evaluating this strategy and may adjust our policy approach in 2026 based on the outcome of that process.
We expect to share an update on this work in January.
China
In China, our 2026 work will focus on generating applied, country-specific evidence to understand which welfare improvements are most viable for industry adoption. Our key priorities include:
Completing a field study to assess the feasibility and impact of selected welfare improvements.
Publishing an industry-facing report in partnership with local collaborators.
Strengthening coordination between industry and academia, with a focus on applied research and practical uptake.
Supporting knowledge exchange among local and international stakeholders.
We also may pursue additional projects as suitable opportunities emerge and capacity allows. Note also that our work in China is still at an early stage, so we expect our plans to evolve as we learn more.
For more information on our work here, feel free to contact Sidd.
Budget and Finances
Our 2026 budget is roughly the same as our 2025 budget—about $830,000. You can see a breakdown of planned expenses below:
The reason the total remains the same comes down to two factors:
Staff costs have increased. We provide annual pay increments for most staff, and we have added several new team members—some in more senior or specialized roles than a year ago—raising overall personnel costs.
Some expected 2025 expenses did not materialize. For example, the prize funds allocated for our second Innovation Challenge were ultimately not awarded. As a result, as of November, we now expect to spend only 86% of our originally budgeted 2025 amount.
From a fundraising perspective, FWI is in a strong position: As discussed in this post, we have now raised sufficient funds to fill our 2026 budget—a huge thank you to all who have donated!
Concluding Notes
2026 will be a pivotal year for our organization: It will be the year in which we learn whether any of our interventions—most notably the ARA, remote sensing, or feed fortification—are ready to become scalable, evidence-based programs capable of helping fishes on thousands of farms.
We do not yet know what the future holds, nor how close we will come to achieving our stated goals. But we are certain of this: the way these sentient animals are treated is a serious ethical issue—one that demands our respect, our attention, and our best efforts. Improving their lives will require the work of many organizations, researchers, and advocates, and we hope that our contribution will continue to play an important part in that effort.
We are deeply grateful to everyone who shares these convictions, and we remain energized by the opportunity we have to better understand what fishes’ lives are like and how we can help ensure they are treated with the dignity they deserve.
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