Oceans & Food

Our food systems will need to feed 9 billion people by 2050, but food from oceans, rivers, and lakes—also known as blue food—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 blue food systems and affect their productivity.

Together with Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, and EAT, we created the Blue Food Assessment – an international effort to put blue food in the center of the global food policy agenda. The Blue Food Assessment brought together more than 100 leading researchers from more than 25 institutions around the world and was the first comprehensive review of aquatic foods and their roles in the global food system.

To date, eight Assessment papers have published in various Springer-Nature journals. Alongside the papers, a synthesis for policymakers was presented at the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 to help guide diverse decision-makers – governments, companies, and consumers – whose choices will shape the future of food and of the ocean. The Blue Food Assessment provided a foundation for other Oceans & Food efforts, including evaluating blue foods in climate strategies, national and regional assessments, and building a global network of blue food researchers.

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