Oceans & Food

Our food systems will need to feed 9 billion people by 2050, but food from the oceans has not been well integrated into potential solutions. Land use change, nutrient inputs from agriculture, and increasing demand for animal protein are all likely to place additional stress on oceans and affect their productivity.

Through a partnership with Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stockholm Resilience Centre, World Resources Institute, EAT and Springer Nature, we created the Blue Food Assessment – an international effort to put “blue food” (food from marine and freshwater systems) in the center of the global food policy agenda. This is the first comprehensive review of aquatic foods and their roles in the global food system.

We are working with a community of researchers investigating the many connections between oceans and the food system. This assessment comprises eight articles, which will be published in Nature journals. The set, along with a synthesis and a policymaker summary, will be presented as a report for the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. We aim to generate insights that can guide the diverse decision-makers – governments, companies, and consumers – whose choices will shape the future of food and of the ocean.  

Visit the Blue Food Assessment website here