Identifying future climate risks embedded in international seafood import portfolios

Seafood, one of the most highly traded commodities, benefits diverse livelihoods and supports global nutrition by supplying critical fatty acids, micronutrients, and animal protein. Additionally to providing nutrients, seafood production can be sustainable, having low greenhouse gas emissions similar to plant-based foods. Seafood is highly-traded, with around ⅓ of fishery production exported and with seafood demand varying geographically, seafood trade and consumption are becoming increasingly globalized. Seafood trade is especially important for buffering food insecurities within equatorial regions as they are subject to nutritional deficiencies and food vulnerabilities, and many countries rely on imports for large shares of their seafood consumption. Reliance on seafood imports, however, may introduce implications for the risk of countries’ imports; imports are critical for food security as food availability tends to be higher with imports.

At the same time, catch is projected to decline in some regions under climate change, which may pose threats to countries’ import portfolios, and furthermore their food security. Climate change can lead to reductions in seafood macro- and micronutrients and may become increasingly constrained by slow moving climatic changes. Additionally moving into the future, species invasion may be the most intense around the arctic and southern oceans, limiting catch. This may impact lower income, climate vulnerable countries the most including wild capture fisheries in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, equatorial regions, and Small Island Developing States. This creates a potential vulnerability for import dependent countries, as declines in partner countries’ exports can reduce importer’s national seafood supplies, and there are currently no risk evaluations on countries’ seafood imports. We pose the overarching research question: What is the future climate risk embedded in countries’ seafood import portfolios?

To answer this research question, We will apply the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vulnerability formula to compare risk across countries: Vulnerability = (Exposure + Sensitivity) - Adaptive Capacity. We are leveraging the new Aquatic Resource Trade in Species (ARTIS) database which has disaggregated global trade data by country of harvest, production method, and species, resulting in estimated consumption for over 2400 species, 193 countries, and 35 million bilateral trade records going back to 1996 as measures of sensitivity. We are also compiling social-economic variables from national data portals and future climatic variables as measures for adaptive capacity and exposure. We will present estimated national vulnerabilities of import portfolios to climate change, highlighting the regions with the highest vulnerabilities and the factors driving high vulnerability. We hypothesize that countries’ imports that are dependent on lower latitude countries while having a lower adaptive capacity will yield higher import portfolio risks (e.g., U.S with high adaptive capacity relying on imports from low latitude countries = lower risk; Liberia with low adaptive capacity relying … = higher risk). The results from this work highlight a key vulnerability in the ability of aquatic foods to contribute to nutrition security in the face of climate change and point to areas in need of adaptation strategies.