A new review of the aquatic foods sector, or “blue” foods, shows how fisheries and aquaculture can play a greater role in delivering nutrition and improving food systems around the world.

Five peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nature highlight the opportunities to leverage the vast diversity of blue foods in the coming decades to address malnutrition, lower the environmental footprint of the food system, and provide livelihoods.

People around the world eat more than 2,500 species or species groups of fish, shellfish, aquatic plants, and algae. Together, these foods provide livelihoods and incomes for more than 100 million and sustenance for one billion.

“People are trying to make more informed choices about the food they eat, in particular the environmental footprint of their food,” says Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, who with colleagues reports findings in three papers on the environmental sustainability of aquatic foods, the potential for the growth of small-scale producers, and the climate risks that face aquatic food systems.

“For the first time we pulled together data from hundreds of studies on a wide range of seafood species to help answer that question. Blue foods stack up really well overall and provide a great option for sustainable food.”

The research projects that global demand for blue foods will roughly double by 2050 and will be met primarily through increased aquaculture production rather than by capture fisheries.

Investing in innovation and improving fisheries management could increase consumption even more and have profound effects on malnutrition. For instance, a “high growth” modeling scenario showed that increasing supply by 15.5 million tons (8%), causing a drop in prices, would reduce cases of nutrient deficiencies by 166 million, especially among low-income populations.

Read the full article about aquatic foods by Sonia Fernandez at Futurity.