by Sonia Fernandez
September 17, 2021
https://www.futurity.org/blue-foods-aqu ... 2628512-2/
Introduction:
https://www.nature.com/collections/fijabaiach(Futurity) Five peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nature (see link provided below this quote box) highlight the opportunities to leverage the vast diversity of blue foods in the coming decades to address malnutrition, lower the environmental footprint of the food system, and provide livelihoods.
People around the world eat more than 2,500 species or species groups of fish, shellfish, aquatic plants, and algae. Together, these foods provide livelihoods and incomes for more than 100 million and sustenance for one billion.
“People are trying to make more informed choices about the food they eat, in particular the environmental footprint of their food,” says Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, who with colleagues reports findings in three papers on the environmental sustainability of aquatic foods, the potential for the growth of small-scale producers, and the climate risks that face aquatic food systems.
“For the first time we pulled together data from hundreds of studies on a wide range of seafood species to help answer that question. Blue foods stack up really well overall and provide a great option for sustainable food.”
The research projects that global demand for blue foods will roughly double by 2050 and will be met primarily through increased aquaculture production rather than by capture fisheries.
Introduction:
*https://bluefood.earth/(Nature) Aquatic foods are an important component of many food systems, yet have received little attention in food policy discourse. This collection (see link above this quote box) - the result of a collaboration between The Blue Food* Assessment and the Nature journals - shines a light on the contribution that aquatic foods can make to future food systems and the challenges that need to be tackled if these contributions are to be realized.
The Blue Food Assessment, a collaboration between the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and Stanford University in partnership with EAT, brings together over 100 researchers to explore the role that aquatic foods can play in building healthy, sustainable and equitable food systems. Here, Nature and the Nature journals present some of the findings along with comment and opinion pieces on the project.
Here is a link and an abstract for one of the Nature articles:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03917-1
(Nature) Despite contributing to healthy diets for billions of people, aquatic foods are often undervalued as a nutritional solution because their diversity is often reduced to the protein and energy value of a single food type (‘seafood’ or ‘fish’)1,2,3,4. Here we create a cohesive model that unites terrestrial foods with nearly 3,000 taxa of aquatic foods to understand the future impact of aquatic foods on human nutrition. We project two plausible futures to 2030: a baseline scenario with moderate growth in aquatic animal-source food (AASF) production, and a high-production scenario with a 15-million-tonne increased supply of AASFs over the business-as-usual scenario in 2030, driven largely by investment and innovation in aquaculture production. By comparing changes in AASF consumption between the scenarios, we elucidate geographic and demographic vulnerabilities and estimate health impacts from diet-related causes. Globally, we find that a high-production scenario will decrease AASF prices by 26% and increase their consumption, thereby reducing the consumption of red and processed meats that can lead to diet-related non-communicable diseases5,6 while also preventing approximately 166 million cases of inadequate micronutrient intake. This finding provides a broad evidentiary basis for policy makers and development stakeholders to capitalize on the potential of aquatic foods to reduce food and nutrition insecurity and tackle malnutrition in all its forms.