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The environmental footprint of fisheries

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 1312–1313 (2023)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 25 September 2023

The Original Article was published on 24 October 2022

arising from B. S. Halpern et al. Nature Sustainability https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00965-x (2022)

Halpern et al.1 estimated environmental pressures of producing alternative foods using four indicators—greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater use, habitat disturbance and nutrient pollution—and compared the total environmental pressure of different foods. They found that capture fisheries had among the highest environmental pressures despite the fact that fisheries use no freshwater and produce no nutrient pollution, and most of this pressure came from habitat disturbance. However, their metric for habitat disturbance for fisheries was totally different from that used for livestock and agriculture, and if a similar metric had been used, the estimated environmental pressure for capture fisheries would have been much lower. Unlike agriculture, which replaces natural ecosystems largely with monocultures of crops, capture fisheries can be sustained in natural ecosystems whose structure and function are largely intact.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Ray Hilborn

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  1. Ray Hilborn
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Correspondence to Ray Hilborn.

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Competing interests

R.H. receives research funding from many groups that have interests in fisheries outcomes, including environmental NGOs, foundations, governments and fishing industry groups.

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Nature Sustainability thanks R. Quentin Grafton for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Hilborn, R. The environmental footprint of fisheries. Nat Sustain 6, 1312–1313 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01222-5

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