Our thanks go to FCRN member Emma Garnett for bringing to our attention a recent paper that investigates how land use could change if consumption were to shift away from meat and towards seafood from aquaculture. Aquaculture systems frequently use feed that is made from land-based crops. The paper studied two aquaculture-heavy scenarios (one using only marine aquaculture, and one using the current ratio of marine to freshwater aquaculture) where all additional meat consumption in 2050 (compared to today) is replaced by aquaculture products. Compared to a business-as-usual scenario for 2050, the aquaculture scenarios use around one-fifth less land to produce feed crops, because of the relative efficiency of aquatic organisms (compared to land-based animals) in converting feed into food that can be eaten by humans.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) hopes to use blockchain technology to make the entire seafood supply chain traceable. Working with tech startup TraSeable, fishing company Sea Quest and blockchain company Viant, WWF is running a pilot project to trace tuna through the supply chain by tagging catches with radio-frequency identification chips and QR codes - which can be scanned by a mobile phone.

This book, edited by Faisal I. Hai, Chettiyappan Visvanathan and Ramaraj Boopathy, discusses the social, economic and environmental sustainability implications of various aquaculture practices.

Building UK fish stocks up to their maximum sustainable yields could increase fish catches by 27%, create 5,100 new jobs and add £319 million to the UK’s GDP, NGO Oceana reports. Oceana points out that Brexit may provide a window of opportunity to change the UK’s fishing practices for the better.

Start-up Wild Type have raised $3.5 million towards the development of a platform and set of technologies that they hope could allow any type of meat to be cultured in the laboratory.

Finless Foods hopes to make laboratory-cultured bluefin tuna the same price as the conventional product by the end of next year (bluefin tuna, threatened by overfishing, can sell for around $380/lb).

After a 25 year wait for approval, approximately five tons of genetically modified (GM) salmon have been sold in Canada in the last few months. The fish, which contains genes from Chinook salmon and ocean pout, can grow twice as fast as an Atlantic salmon and requires 75% less feed to grow to the same size. These changes can ultimately reduce the carbon footprint of each genetically modified salmon by up to 25 times, the company claims.

This paper models human and natural influences on the global capture of wild marine fish. The researchers show that wild fish harvest increases during the 20th century were most likely explained by improvements in fishing technology. Their simulated future projections, that assume ongoing technological progress and open access (i.e. no policy constraints), suggest a long-term decrease in harvest due to over-fishing.

This systematic review considers how seafood is currently incorporated and assessed in the sustainable diets literature and examines the barriers to more adequate inclusion of seafood within research on sustainable diets.