Synthesizing the environmental performance and nutritional values of seafood - a basis for optimizing future diets for health and sustainability

Seafood, an essential component of human diets, is projected to play a more important role in future diets due to its beneficial nutritional characteristics and – on average- more sustainable production than many other animal protein sources. Still, we only produce 4% of our food on the 70% of earth surface constituted by the oceans. Despite its major potentials, seafood is often excluded from analyses in the rapidly growing body of literature on sustainable diets. Alternatively, it is included in ways that, at worst, can lead policy-makers in the wrong direction, e.g. grouping high- and low-impact fisheries together or using studies of niche fisheries or aquaculture systems to represent a certain commodity.We will synthesize knowledge from the literature on environmental performance of different types of seafood in a scientifically robust manner. Based in broad knowledge about seafood production systems, we will define meaningful product groups, align methodologies, and select and aggregate data from published studies to represent the products chosen. The resulting dataset will be combined with data describing the nutritional values of seafood in an integrated way. All in all, the project will lead to important insights about the potential role of seafood in future sustainable diets, identified as a significant gap in sustainable nutrition research. The results of this synthesis project would enable a more meaningful inclusion of seafood in the modelling of future diets.