What We Did

With the launch of the Blue Food Assessment in September 2021, we introduced new research to fill existing gaps in knowledge on how blue foods can contribute to healthier, more sustainable and more equitable food systems. In our Report of the Blue Food Assessment, we synthesized the Assessment’s key scientific findings, contextualized them within broader research, and outlined their implications for food systems, including major challenges that must be addressed. We aim to provide decision-makers with scientific insights on opportunities,  tradeoffs and solutions so they can implement policies that will benefit both people and the planet.

The blue food sector is complex. We hope that our work helps illuminate key issues and provides answers grounded in the latest science. We welcome questions and will update this page as the research evolves and new questions arise.

The Blue Food Assessment set out in 2019 to 1) fill important gaps in our understanding of the role blue foods play in global food systems 2) inform and drive change in the policies and practices that will shape future food systems. Our research has been published in eight peer-reviewed papers, a report for decision-makers and a global digital launch event. This work provides a scientific foundation for integrating blue foods in future food systems.

The Blue Food Assessment brought together more than 100 leading researchers from more than 25 institutions around the world. Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions and Center on Food Security and the Environment and the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University were lead science partners and EAT was the lead impact partner.

The Blue Food Assessment was funded by grants from six philanthropies: the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, MAVA Foundation, Oak Foundation, Stordalen Foundation, The Builders Initiative and the Walton Family Foundation. Funders were not involved in the research, which was independently peer-reviewed, nor in shaping or communicating our findings. (Please see here for a full list of our funding and impact partners.)

The Blue Food Assessment published eight papers in various Springer-Nature journals. All Blue Food Assessment papers have been subject to Springer-Nature’s standard peer-review process. Nature’s presented the findings through an ‘immersive’ webpage, podcast episode, and editorial piece. 

Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions and Center on Food Security and the Environment, the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, EAT, WorldFish and other institutions involved in the Blue Food Assessment have contributed to the proposal for an Aquatic Blue Food Coalition. The multi-sectoral Coalition formally launched at the United Nations Ocean Conference in June 2022 and includes the European Union, Fiji, Germany, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, Palau, Portugal and the United States of America, in addition to representatives from intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, academic institutions, aquatic food producers and those along the value chain, consumer groups, financial institutions and philanthropies. It aims to promote understanding, acceptance and integration of sustainable blue foods in food systems and food value chain thinking and decision-making.

Blue Food Assessment scientists also contributed to the development of the Blue Food Partnership. Convened by the Friends of Ocean Action, this partnership aims to catalyze science-based actions towards healthy and sustainable blue food value chains. BFA findings continue to provide a scientific basis for this work moving forward.

The goal of the Blue Food Assessment is to provide the scientific foundation decision-makers need to evaluate opportunities, tradeoffs and implement sustainable solutions in both the public and private sectors. We hope that our participation in the development of the Aquatic Blue Food Coalition and the Blue Food Partnership will help ensure that decision-makers have the scientific knowledge they need to make informed choices.

Blue Food Assessment scientists contributed to the development of the Sustainable Blue Food Futures for People & Planet Program (Blue Food Futures Program), officially endorsed by the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The program will build on the progress of previous research generated by the Blue Food Assessment and knowledge-to-action initiatives set in motion by the Aquatic Blue Food Coalition. The program partners Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Government of Iceland, the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, WorldFish, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, the University of British Columbia, and Xiamen University will build a global network to further blue food research, policy, and sustainability solutions.

Blue foods, also known as aquatic foods, are foods that are captured or cultivated from the ocean, rivers, lakes, ponds, raceways and tanks. Blue foods can derive from aquatic animals, plants, or algae. They support hundreds of millions of livelihoods and are a critical source of nutrition for several billion people around the world.

When talking about blue foods, the Blue Food Assessment aims to highlight connections to green or land-based foods like terrestrial crops and livestock, which often dominate global food system discussions. The Assessment also strives to highlight opportunities, challenges  and tradeoffs to ensure that they receive the political attention they deserve.  

For example, food system policies and analyses have often considered blue food as a homogenous “fish” category, overlooking the vast diversity of animals, plants and algae that are produced or harvested for food. The Blue Food Assessment begins the critical work of moving beyond “fish” as one category. For example, the nutrition paper offers the most comprehensive database of blue food nutrition ever assembled, mapping nutrient content across more than 3,750 aquatic species. Other papers highlight the need to analyze data across various regions (demand) and production systems (environmental performance). An important finding of the Assessment is that to better manage the blue food sector, governments need to collect more detailed data on blue food production, consumption, and trade.  

Sustainably produced blue foods can help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals including the goals of eliminating hunger and improving health (SDGs 2 and 3); increasing the sustainability of oceans, water, climate and land (SDGs 6, 13, 14 and 15); and achieving gender equality, improving livelihoods and reducing inequalities (SDGs 5, 8 and 10).

Blue foods provide much more than protein. Many blue food species are rich in nutrients such as zinc, iron, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and omega 3s. Eating more blue food can help prevent non-communicable diseases and nutrient deficiencies, especially in regions and populations where there are high burdens of malnutrition. 

Numerous pollutants can find their way into the foods we eat. Blue foods are no exception, and can contain pollutants like PCBs, pesticides and heavy metals. Health risk is determined by a number of factors, including the life cycle of a species, its position in the food chain and its geographic distribution. For example, seafood can accumulate toxins that naturally occur in phytoplankton; antibiotics used in aquaculture can reside in produced seafood and can develop resistance; and coastal fisheries and aquaculture may be at risk from various chemicals and human pathogens when exposed to urban wastewater. Consuming blue foods requires a careful evaluation of the benefits versus the risks: Health, diet, preference, culture, access and affordability all play a role. Measures to identify and address contamination in blue foods are crucial. 

Although blue food consumption has associated risks, it also offers numerous benefits. The Assessment’s nutrition paper presents the world’s most extensive database on the nutritional value of blue foods, tracking hundreds of nutrients found in more than 3,750 aquatic species consumed globally. The study also highlights the significant role blue foods play in meeting the dietary needs of nutritionally vulnerable populations, while also mitigating chronic diseases by steering people away from red and processed meats. 

Blue food systems support livelihoods for 800 million people worldwide and are a cornerstone of many rural and national economies, from large-scale fisheries and aquaculture producers to small-scale fishers. 

Blue foods offer a rich array of possibilities for creating food systems that are healthy, diversified, empowering and environmentally sustainable. Properly managed or designed, many wild-caught or farmed blue foods can be produced with lower greenhouse gas emissions and fewer impacts on the environment than terrestrial animal-source foods. 

Blue food production can have significant negative impacts if poorly managed. Some capture fisheries suffer from overfishing and high levels of bycatch, for example, while some aquaculture operations destroy habitat, cause significant pollution and use large quantities of wild fish for feed. With the right management, however, blue foods can be caught with reduced impacts on biodiversity or grown more sustainably than various terrestrial animal proteins, thus producing lower greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution and using fewer land and water resources. There are major opportunities for further reducing the impacts of blue food production both by driving improvements in existing blue food systems and by shifting to blue food species and systems that have much lower negative environmental impacts or even, in some cases, net-positive impacts. 

The Assessment’s environmental performance paper develops standardized estimates for several key stressors—greenhouse gas, nitrogen and phosphorus emissions, and freshwater and land use—to enable comparison of foods across aquatic and terrestrial systems. This paper also discusses larger ecosystem impacts such as bycatch, stock depletion and ghost nets associated with overfishing, for example, and notes that looking at ecological impacts and other stressors together can reveal important trade-offs, as well as potential synergies. Fisheries can be—and often are—managed sustainably. They can even be restored. 

The Blue Food Assessment does not call for increased fishing activity. Overfishing is addressed in our report as one of the many challenges facing blue food systems and we call for improved wild capture fisheries management. Overfishing and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing can be controlled by robustly managing domestic fisheries, regulating distant water fleets and instituting effective port controls to prevent the landing of illegally caught fish, and by removing or reducing subsidies that create overcapacity of fishing fleets or subsidizes fuel use. 

In October of 2021, over a dozen Blue Food Assessment scientists authored a letter in Science that calls for ending such harmful fishing subsidies. This would be an important step, but more action is needed.

The Blue Food Assessment’s demand paper projects that demand for blue food is expected to roughly double by 2050. This demand will likely be met principally by aquaculture expansion. As noted in our report, aquaculture faces challenges that must be addressed: It can destroy habitats, produce excess nutrients and pathogens, lead to the use of antibiotics and create a reliance on feed produced from wild-caught fish and agricultural crops. 

As noted in our environmental performance paper, progress in recent years has demonstrated the potential for substantial gains in both efficiency and sustainability through better management and reduced reliance on wild fish for feed. Between 1997 and 2017, for example, the amount of wild fish used to produce a kilogram of farmed fish declined by 85%. But reliance on land-based feed, such as soy protein, can also have unintended environmental consequences through land conversion and deforestation for feed crops and pollution from agricultural production.

Aquaculture is among the fastest growing food sectors. As demand for blue food grows, the global community has an opportunity to steer expansion towards sustainability. The Blue Food Assessment supports sustainable aquaculture operations that actively mitigate environmental risks and optimize for sustainable feeds, as indicated in our environmental performance paper.

The Blue Food Assessment emphasizes the importance of recognizing and supporting the needs of small-scale producers who provide the majority of blue food people eat but are often overlooked, especially women, Indigenous communities, and other marginalized communities. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), small-scale fisheries produce two-thirds of catches destined for direct human consumption and provide 90% of the employment in the sector.

The Blue Food Assessment paper on small-scale fisheries and aquaculture (SSFA) showcases how SSFA span a range of geographies, cultures, technologies, markets and access rights. However, governments are typically indifferent to the heterogeneity of SSFA and lack the data to understand, monitor and manage them. Blue food policies must recognize their importance and diversity in order to empower and support them.

As the principal source of livelihoods and nutrition in their communities, SSFA often provide vital welfare benefits. Those benefits can be undermined by industrial fisheries and aquaculture operations, often for export, which generate revenues and GDP but, in the absence of regulations and access rights for small-scale actors, also deplete their stocks and encroach on communal fishing grounds. Global supply chains are complex and often opaque, making it difficult or impossible for buyers to identify and trace environmental impacts and human rights abuses in production.

The distribution of benefits from blue food systems is highly uneven. Although blue food value chains employ roughly equal numbers of men and women, their influence, voice and access to benefits are often highly unequal. Empowering women and other marginalized groups and sharing access and benefits more equitably could create blue food systems that are more just and yield better nutritional outcomes for communities.

In our justice paper, researchers combined data on blue food production, distribution and consumption in 195 countries to assess dimensions of justice in blue food systems and the impact of policy measures that address it. The paper finds that there is often tension between sustaining welfare (livelihoods, food security, culture) and generating wealth (revenues, GDP). 

It will be vitally important for decision-makers to address these challenges as they integrate blue foods safely and justly into food systems transformation. 

Food system transformation will require different paths in different contexts, but as set out in our report and policy briefs all governments and other food system actors have roles to play to manage blue foods as an integral part of food systems: identify and reform policies and practices that impede transformation; protect and harness the diversity of blue food systems to provide nutrition, accessibility and sustainability; recognize and support the central role of small-scale actors; and commit to human rights in policy and practice.