Blue foods — those that come from the ocean or freshwater environments — have tremendous potential to help address several global challenges.
Blue foods — those that come from the ocean or freshwater environments — have tremendous potential to help address several global challenges. With careful implementation of policies that leverage these foods, nations could get a boost on efforts to reduce nutritional deficits, lower disease risk, decrease greenhouse gas emissions and ensure resilience in the face of climate change.
So say the team of experts at Blue Food Assessment(link is external), an international collaboration of scientists whose focus has been on the role of aquatic foods in global food systems. In a paper(link is external) published today in the journal Nature, the scientists tease out the global-scale benefits of adding more blue food to the world’s diet.
“Even though people around the world depend on and enjoy seafood, the potential for these blue foods to benefit people and the environment remains underappreciated,” said UC Santa Barbara marine ecologist Ben Halpern(link is external), director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis(link is external) and a member of the team. “With this work, we bring attention to these many possibilities and the transformative benefit that blue foods can have for people’s lives and the environments in which they live.”
Read more at: University of California - Santa Barbara
Ben Halpern (Photo Credit: University of California - Santa Barbara)
