Strengthening the diverse ways people access seafood can ensure healthy communities in the face of change

As climate change impacts the oceans, coastal communities, especially those on the front lines of ocean warming and sea level rise, face pressures that could threaten their access to aquatic foods.

“Climate change and other economic shocks are impacting how people access seafood, and typically the households that rely on them most, such as those in Pacific island countries, are most at risk,” said Jacob Eurich, a Marine research associate at UC Santa Barbara. Science Institute and fisheries researcher at the Environmental Defense Fund. This is why, he added, it is necessary to increase the resilience of the food system in the region, which implies, among other things, the ability to maintain high levels of seafood consumption.

Fortunately, local strategies to achieve this may already exist. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesEurich, UC Santa Cruz assistant professor of environmental studies Katherine Seto and an international cohort of researchers say that understanding and strengthening the pathways by which individuals and households in these communities currently access nutritious food — as opposed to creating new technologies and implementing new processes – is a way to effectively adapt to emerging environmental and economic changes.

Case in point: Kiribati, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean. Highly dependent on aquatic food from its waters, the local population also faces social forces such as the importation of food from abroad, as well as the biophysical forces of climate change. Food system resilience here requires good and consistent access to local seafood.

“We wanted to better understand how households benefit, or don’t, from seafood resources, because we think it’s something we often assume and are rarely able to really explore,” said Seto, the lead author of the study.

To do this, the research team used the concept of access theory, which tracks the flow of benefits (in this case, high-quality nutrition) as food moves from ocean to table . Rather than using the community’s proximity to seafood as a representation of their ability to feed themselves, they traced the actual pathways by which Kiribati acquired seafood. Households consuming a lot of seafood were of particular interest to the researchers, as they wanted to see what strategies they used to access seafood.

“We measured the real consumption benefits of eating seafood, and the results about who benefits the most and who benefits the least are not as intuitive as you might think,” explained Seto.

“Through the large dataset and machine learning algorithm, we were able to identify the importance of different variables from nested and interacting relationships and understand the distinct strategies of households to secure the benefit of seafood resources ” said co-author Whitney Friedman of UC Santa Cruz. .

Indeed, the results showed that access to seafood markets was the key mechanism promoting access to seafood in Kiribati, surpassing other factors such as occupation, education, capital and technology.

“Market access is important for the future of policies,” Eurich said. “Specifically, it is essential to ensure equitable access to markets.”

By tracking seafood, the researchers also noticed a somewhat hidden trend, which would not have been evident during a more conventional analysis of the food system.

“We were surprised to find that households that consume a lot of seafood tended not to use formal markets and monetary means and instead relied on domestic production and barter for the acquisition of seafood ” said Eurich.

While households generally use a combination of strategies to acquire seafood, the largest consumers of seafood tend to be those who use the market the least. These populations included gift-givers in urban areas, emphasizing the social and non-market aspect of acquiring seafood, as well as community members who fished and gleaned themselves and also used the catch for purposes commercial, circumventing the market. The heavy consumers who used the market the most belonged to the smallest group, made up of affluent, affluent and urban households.

“From a policy perspective, the promotion of social networks through fishing groups or cooperatives could strengthen healthy seafood-based diets, in addition to commonly proposed interventions on the food system, notably in addressing supply chain inefficiencies,” Eurich said.

The study results also revealed a distinct consumption pattern: different households ate different seafood.

“This means that household strategies are not only important in determining the overall consumption benefit a household derives from seafood,” Seto said, “but also the potential implications for the environment, food safety and and nutritional, because not all seafood is the same.