The United States' current Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) and a potential extension are undergoing review, yet quantitative evaluation of the current program is lacking. The SIMP is a traceability program aimed at reducing imports of seafood products that are of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) origin or associated with seafood fraud. We conducted a quantitative examination of the SIMP's current scope and design by synthesizing publicly available trade data along with measures of IUU fishing and seafood mislabeling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReducing the environmental pressures stemming from food production is central to meeting global sustainability targets. Shifting diets represents one lever for improving food system sustainability, and identifying sustainable diet opportunities requires computational models to represent complex systems and allow users to evaluate counterfactual scenarios. Despite an increase in the number of food system sustainability models, there remains a lack of transparency of data inputs and mathematical formulas to facilitate replication by researchers and application by diverse stakeholders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
February 2024
Ensuring healthy and sustainable food systems in increasing social, economic, and ecological change is a key global priority to protect human and environmental health. Seafood is an essential component of these food systems and a critical source of nutrients, especially in coastal communities. However, despite rapid transformations in aquatic food systems, and our urgent need to understand them, there is a dearth of data connecting harvested food production to actualized food consumption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Kiribati 2019 Integrated Household Income and Expenditure Survey (Integrated HIES) embeds novel ecological and human health research into an ongoing social and economic survey infrastructure implemented by the Pacific Community in partnership with national governments. This study seeks to describe the health status of a large, nationally representative sample of a geographically and socially diverse I-Kiribati population through multiple clinical measurements and detailed socio-economic surveys, while also conducting supporting food systems research on ecological, social, and institutional drivers of change. The specific hypotheses within this research relate to access to seafood and the potential nutritional and health benefits of these foods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The 2020 US Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that the US population consume more seafood. Most analyses of seafood consumption ignore heterogeneity in consumption patterns by species, nutritional content, production methods, and price, which have implications for applying recommendations.
Objectives: We assessed seafood intake among adults by socioeconomic and demographic groups, as well as the cost of seafood at retail to identify affordable and nutritious options.
Social-ecological networks (SENs) represent the complex relationships between ecological and social systems and are a useful tool for analyzing and managing ecosystem services. However, mainstreaming the application of SENs in ecosystem service research has been hindered by a lack of clarity about how to match research questions to ecosystem service conceptualizations in SEN (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite 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'). 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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFish and other aquatic foods (blue foods) present an opportunity for more sustainable diets. Yet comprehensive comparison has been limited due to sparse inclusion of blue foods in environmental impact studies relative to the vast diversity of production. Here we provide standardized estimates of greenhouse gas, nitrogen, phosphorus, freshwater and land stressors for species groups covering nearly three quarters of global production.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNumerous studies have focused on the need to expand production of 'blue foods', defined as aquatic foods captured or cultivated in marine and freshwater systems, to meet rising population- and income-driven demand. Here we analyze the roles of economic, demographic, and geographic factors and preferences in shaping blue food demand, using secondary data from FAO and The World Bank, parameters from published models, and case studies at national to sub-national scales. Our results show a weak cross-sectional relationship between per capita income and consumption globally when using an aggregate fish metric.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAquatic foods from marine and freshwater systems are critical to the nutrition, health, livelihoods, economies and cultures of billions of people worldwide, but climate-related hazards may compromise their ability to provide these benefits. Here, we estimate national-level aquatic food system climate risk using an integrative food systems approach that connects climate hazards impacting marine and freshwater capture fisheries and aquaculture to their contributions to sustainable food system outcomes. We show that without mitigation, climate hazards pose high risks to nutritional, social, economic and environmental outcomes worldwide-especially for wild-capture fisheries in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Small Island Developing States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnvironmental variability and shock events can be propagated or attenuated along food supply chains by various economic, political and infrastructural factors. Understanding these processes is central to reducing risks associated with periodic food shortages, price spikes and reductions in food quality. Here we perform a scoping review of the literature to examine entry points for environmental variability along the food supply chain, the evidence of propagation or attenuation of this variability, and the food items and types of shock that have been studied.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe US seafood sector is susceptible to shocks, both because of the seasonal nature of many of its domestic fisheries and its global position as a top importer and exporter of seafood. However, many data sets that could inform science and policy during an emerging event do not exist or are only released months or years later. Here, we synthesize multiple data sources from across the seafood supply chain, including unconventional real-time data sets, to show the relative initial responses and indicators of recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2020
Over the past decade, seafood mislabeling has been increasingly documented, raising public concern over the identity, safety, and sustainability of seafood. Negative outcomes from seafood mislabeling are suspected to be substantial and pervasive as seafood is the world's most highly traded food commodity. Here we provide empirical systems-level evidence that enabling conditions exist for seafood mislabeling in the United States (US) to lead to negative impacts on marine populations and support consumption of products from poorly managed fisheries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAquatic foods are a critical source of human nutrition in many developing countries. As a result, declines in wild-caught fish landings threaten nutritionally vulnerable populations. Aquaculture presents an opportunity to meet local demand, but it also places pressure on natural resource inputs and causes a range of environmental impacts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReducing food loss and waste (FLW) is widely recognized as an important lever for lowering the environmental impacts of food systems. The United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda includes a goal to reduce FLW by 50% by 2030. Given differences in resource inputs along the food supply chain (FSC), the environmental benefits of FLW reduction will vary by stage of the FSC.
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