Four ways blue foods can help achieve food system ambitions across nations

Blue foods, sourced from aquatic environments, are crucial for economies, livelihoods, nutrition, and cultures globally. They often offer nutritional richness, lower emissions, and reduced land/water impacts compared to terrestrial meats. The Blue Food Assessment evaluated blue foods' nutritional, environmental, economic, and justice aspects. This paper translates these findings into four policy objectives to maximize blue foods' contributions to national food systems: ensuring nutrient supplies, providing healthy terrestrial meat alternatives, reducing dietary environmental footprints, and safeguarding blue food's contributions to nutrition, just economies, and livelihoods under climate change. The relevance of each objective is assessed for individual countries, considering co-benefits and trade-offs. Many African and South American nations could address vitamin B12 and omega-3 deficiencies by promoting blue food consumption. Global North nations could lower cardiovascular disease rates and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant meat by moderately consuming low-impact seafood. The framework helps decision-makers assess the most relevant blue food policy objectives for their regions and compare the associated benefits and trade-offs.

Beatrice I. Crona, Emmy Wassénius, Malin Jonell, J. Zachary Koehn, Rebecca Short, Michelle Tigchelaar, Tim M. Daw, Christopher D. Golden, Jessica A. Gephart, Edward H. Allison, Simon R. Bush, Ling Cao, William W. L. Cheung, Fabrice DeClerck, Jessica Fanzo, Stefan Gelcich, Avinash Kishore, Benjamin S. Halpern, Christina C. Hicks, James P. Leape, David C. Little, Fiorenza Micheli, Rosamond L. Naylor, Michael Phillips, Elizabeth R. Selig, Marco Springmann, U. Rashid Sumaila, Max Troell, Shakuntala H. Thilsted, Colette C. C. Wabnitz