Brett Glencross Climate change, marine ingredients, and a ‘blue food’ revolution
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In the city of Glasgow last month, not far from where I live in my adopted home country of Scotland, many of the world’s leaders convened at the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference (COP26). Most of the focus was on the required collective efforts to address future climate change challenges. A range of outcomes were achieved, including agreements on lowering emissions, phasing out the use of coal and improved forest conservation. However, something that to me at least was conspicuous by its absence, was clear progress on food production systems. We all know the science the on how we have arrived at this point – centuries of carbon pollution, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide, and methane among others, that we now collectively refer to as greenhouse gases (GHG). Whilst there are many different origins of these GHG’s, it is notably the emissions from the global food production system that is one of the main drivers. Therefore, clearly a reduction
in global food consumption through reducing our calorie and protein intake and/or population reduction is one strategy, but not a politically attractive one. The main strategy appears to focus on reducing GHG emissions through a reduction in fossil fuel use and/or the capture of those emissions to try and achieve a net zero balance. Maybe the other “balance” we should be thinking about is how much we rely on food production from terrestrial versus marine systems. It seems that most of thinking in terms of improving food production footprint is based in terrestrial agriculture of livestock and crops, GREEN food production systems. But what about food production from marine capture and farming, what about BLUE food?
Having a restorative impact on GHG emissions
A recent study by MacLeod et al, (2020) has shown that marine food production via aquaculture is in a very good position to assist with the reduction of GHG emissions. The authors showed that aquaculture is typically a lower emitter compared to virtually all other animal production systems. The authors also demonstrated that increasingly moving our animal protein production systems off land and into the sea to create a ‘blue food sector,’ where we move our reliance away from terrestrial ecosystems to create a better balance in ecosystem reliance by producing more food from the sea, will be one strategy to address our reduction of GHG emissions. Indeed, in Naylor et al’s (2021) recent 20-year retrospective of global aquaculture they highlighted the role that culture of molluscs and seaweed can have in terms of net carbon removal from the system. Imagine that a food production system that actually has restorative impacts on GHG emissions. That could be one of the benefits of a blue food revolution.
Figure 1: Carbon footprint of different raw materials widely used by the aquafeed industry.
Dr Brett Glencross is the Technical Director of IFFO - The Marine Ingredients Organisation. Over the past 25 years he has worked in various academic, institutional, and industrial roles across Australasia, the Middle East and Europe. 10 | January 2022 - International Aquafeed