Enhancing Blue Resilience with IoT

Aquaculture is an important part of Zambia’s national strategy to improve food security, alleviate rural poverty, and build a sustainable blue economy.

Zambia’s smallholder farmers, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) remain a growing part of the sector, helping close the country’s affordable animal protein deficit, even as they continue to face constraints in accessing finance, quality inputs and markets.

As climate change makes pond conditions increasingly variable and difficult to predict, visual observation and experience alone may no longer be sufficient. Rising temperatures, shifting seasonal boundaries and unexpected microclimatic changes can quickly alter the delicate physical and chemical balance of fishponds.

Sudden drops in dissolved oxygen or rapid increases in water temperature can devastate an entire harvest overnight. Zambia’s aquaculture sector, therefore, needs a proactive, data-informed climate risk management system that combines farmers’ local knowledge with timely weather, water-quality and disease information.

WorldFish and its partners are now piloting a new layer of that system: pond-level real-time water quality monitoring using IoT (Internet of Things).

This pilot advances the Blue Resilience - digital climate advisory services platform by strengthening its capacity to deliver more precise climate services for aquaculture decision-making. Co-designed by WorldFish with the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment and the Department of Fisheries, Blue Resilience currently translates ambient temperature forecasts from the Zambia Meteorological Department (MET) into practical climate-smart SMS advisories for smallholder farmers.

While these forecasts provide valuable guidance, they can only estimate likely pond conditions and cannot capture the real-time dynamics within ponds.

To address this gap, WorldFish, through the CGIAR Climate Action Science Program’s Area of Work 2 on Digital Advisories and Climate Risk Management, is piloting IoT-enabled water-quality monitoring in partnership with Biogreen Technologies.

By integrating real-time pond-level water quality data with climate forecasts, the pilot aims to deliver more accurate, timely, and context-specific advisories. Over time, this could help farmers to make better informed management decisions, reduce climate-related risks, and improve the productivity and resilience of aquaculture systems.

WorldFish recently deployed IoT sensor arrays that continuously collect water-quality data at two contrasting sites: an SME fish farm in Shimabala, Kafue District, Lusaka Province, and the National Aquaculture Research and Development Centre (NARDC) in Mwekera, Kitwe, Copperbelt Province.

The two sites were selected because they represent different aquaculture production systems, an SME operation and a government research and demonstration facility, allowing the team to compare pond behavior and validate sensor performance across different management conditions.

A dedicated hands-on training session was conducted for both SME and NARDC technical staff to build their capacity in operating and maintaining the IoT water-quality monitoring system.

The training covered sensor installation, device configuration, data transmission and dashboard use, routine equipment inspections, basic troubleshooting, and preventive maintenance.

By strengthening local technical capacity, the training helps ensure reliable system performance, supports timely interpretation of real-time water-quality data, and lays the foundation for the long-term sustainability and scalability of IoT-enabled climate advisory services for precision aquaculture management.

Rather than replacing farmers’ knowledge or the existing weather-based advisories, the sensors are designed to complement them.

While atmospheric forecasts provide broader signals about incoming weather systems and ambient temperature trends, the IoT sensors continuously capture real-time changes in water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, and turbidity within the pond itself.

Together, these complementary data streams provide a fuller picture of pond health and a stronger foundation for delivering more precise climate advisories.

“This vital information is exactly what is needed to help us alleviate production losses and make better-informed decisions and also address instances of unexplained mortalities,” said the SME fish farmer.

The integrated Blue Resilience approach combines:

• Meteorological forecasts from the Zambia Meteorological Department, providing predictive information on weather patterns and ambient temperature trends.
• Real-time IoT pond monitoring, measuring water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, and turbidity directly within the pond.

These data streams are brought together through the Blue Resilience platform to generate increasingly accurate, hyper-local climate advisories for fish farmers.

The project is currently in a baseline data collection and analysis phase.

Over the coming months, the sensors will continuously collect detailed information on localized changes in water quality, which will be analyzed alongside meteorological data from the Zambia Meteorological Department to refine the predictive algorithms that underpin Blue Resilience.

As the calibration phase progresses, WorldFish and its partners, including NARDC, will assess how this pond-level data can best reach farmers — whether through more precise SMS advisories, threshold-based alerts, improved predictive models, or dashboards for extension officers and researchers.

The goal is to move from estimated prediction models toward hyper-local, multi-parameter climate advisories that give farmers advance warning to adjust aeration, feeding practices, or water replenishment before changing pond conditions lead to fish mortality.

If successful, Integrating IoT water monitoring alongside meteorological information could significantly strengthen climate resilience within Zambia’s aquaculture sector.

More precise, synchronized air-and-water monitoring could enable farmers to respond proactively to sudden changes in dissolved oxygen or extreme water temperatures before fish losses occur, for example, by reducing feeding rates, increasing aeration, checking water exchange, or preparing for heat-related oxygen stress ahead of a forecast heatwave.

Improved pond-side temperature information could also help farmers optimize feeding practices, an important benefit given that feed accounts for up to 70 percent of fish production costs and remains one of the largest investments in aquaculture production.

At the same time, integrating continuous monitoring data with national research institutions such as NARDC could strengthen local scientific capacity by generating the high-resolution datasets needed to support climate adaptation research, innovation, and evidence-based decision-making across the country.

Zambia’s digital transition in aquaculture is still at an early stage, but it is already underway.

By combining national atmospheric forecasts with real-time pond monitoring, WorldFish is working to expand the capabilities of Blue Resilience to deliver increasingly accurate, locally relevant, and actionable climate advisories.

This integrated approach, grounded in both farmers’ knowledge and continuous data, aims to help farmers anticipate climate risks, protect their harvests, and build a more productive, resilient, and sustainable aquaculture sector.