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Reply to: The environmental footprint of fisheries

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 1314–1315 (2023)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 25 September 2023

replying to R. Hilborn Nature Sustainability https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01222-5 (2023)

Hilborn raises concerns about how we calculated the disturbance pressure for fisheries, one of four measures in our metric of cumulative environmental pressure assessed across all food types, arguing that it overestimates the footprint of wild-caught fishing and cannot be compared with agriculture1. We agree there is inherent uncertainty and room for improvement in any method, including ours. However, we feel that Hilborn oversimplified what we did to the point of misrepresenting the work.

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References

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

  2. Halpern, B. S. et al. The environmental footprint of global food production. Nat. Sustain. 5, 1027–1039 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Kuempel, C. D. et al. Integrating life cycle and impact assessments to map food’s cumulative environmental footprint. One Earth 3, 65–78 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Benjamin S. Halpern, Melanie Frazier, Paul-Eric Rayner & Gage Clawson

  2. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Benjamin S. Halpern

  3. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Gage Clawson & Julia L. Blanchard

  4. Centre for Marine Socioecology, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Gage Clawson, Julia L. Blanchard, Richard S. Cottrell & Kirsty L. Nash

  5. Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Halley E. Froehlich

  6. Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Halley E. Froehlich

  7. Department of Environmental Science, American University, Washington, DC, USA

    Jessica A. Gephart

  8. National Institute of Aquatic Resources, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

    Nis Sand Jacobsen

  9. Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Caitlin D. Kuempel

  10. School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Caitlin D. Kuempel

  11. Program for Industrial Ecology, Department of Energy and Process Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Daniel Moran

  12. Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    David R. Williams

Authors
  1. Benjamin S. Halpern
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  2. Melanie Frazier
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  3. Paul-Eric Rayner
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  4. Gage Clawson
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  5. Julia L. Blanchard
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  6. Richard S. Cottrell
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  7. Halley E. Froehlich
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  8. Jessica A. Gephart
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  9. Nis Sand Jacobsen
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  10. Caitlin D. Kuempel
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  11. Daniel Moran
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  12. Kirsty L. Nash
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  13. David R. Williams
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Contributions

The manuscript was drafted by B.S.H. and edited by all coauthors (B.S.H., M.F., P.-E.R., G.C., J.L.B., R.S.C., H.E.F., J.A.G., N.S.J., C.D.K., D.M., K.L.N. and D.R.W.).

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Benjamin S. Halpern.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

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

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Halpern, B.S., Frazier, M., Rayner, PE. et al. Reply to: The environmental footprint of fisheries. Nat Sustain 6, 1314–1315 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01223-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01223-4

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