Projecting pathways to achieve sustainable ocean targets for food security, climate resilience, and biodiversity conservation

The ocean's capacity to sustainably, equitably, and safely produce food is declining due to ongoing biodiversity losses driven by direct exploitation, climate change, and other human-induced stressors such as plastic pollution. Solutions such as fisheries management, aquaculture, and marine protected areas have been proposed to reverse these declines. However, recent analyses of global fisheries and aquaculture trends highlight intensifying trade-offs and inequities within and across seafood production, climate action, and biodiversity conservation. In this study, we apply multiple integrated models—encompassing climate, biodiversity, seafood production, and economic impacts—at both global and regional scales to assess how portfolios of proposed solutions could achieve sustainable, equitable seafood security and biodiversity conservation targets under climate change. The models incorporate scenarios for both direct and indirect drivers, including changing ocean conditions, demographic shifts, seafood demand and prices, fisheries management, and aquaculture development strategies. Our projections indicate that urgent, unprecedented actions on multiple fronts to reduce fishing effort, develop sustainable aquaculture, expand marine protected areas, and advance climate mitigation, are required to meet sustainable, equitable seafood security goals. Climate change disproportionately impacts the capacity to produce nutrient-rich seafood for local consumption and rebuild depleted biomass, especially for low- and middle-income countries in the tropics and vulnerable communities in extra-tropical regions. We show that conservation- and vulnerable communities- oriented ocean management strategies and keeping global warming below 1.5°C are necessary conditions to achieve seafood and biodiversity targets. Our findings underscore the co-benefits and trade-offs in the pathways towards achieving food, climate and biodiversity ocean targets. We highlight how scenarios and models with participatory approaches can facilitate the co-development of portfolios of sustainable and equitable solution options for ocean-based food systems.