Mexican Small‐Scale Fisheries Reveal New Insights into Low‐Carbon Seafood and “Climate‐Friendly” Fisheries Management

As a society, we are confronted with the question of how best to feed an expanding human population, and some have pointed to seafood as a “climate‐friendly” option. To date, the contributions of small‐scale fisheries (SSFs) have been largely excluded from studies on food footprint. Here, we calcula...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Fisheries (Bethesda) 2021-06, Vol.46 (6), p.277-287
Main Authors: Ferrer, Erica M., Aburto-Oropeza, Octavio, Jiménez-Esquivel, Victoria, Cota-Nieto, Juan José, Mascareñas-Osorio, Ismael, López-Sagástegui, Catalina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Approximation
Carbon
Carbon footprint
Climate
Data
Emissions
Environmental accounting
Environmental impact
Fisheries
Fisheries management
Fishers
Fishery management
Global positioning systems
GPS
Human populations
Seafood
Seafoods
Small-scale fisheries
Sustainability
Tracking
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Summary:As a society, we are confronted with the question of how best to feed an expanding human population, and some have pointed to seafood as a “climate‐friendly” option. To date, the contributions of small‐scale fisheries (SSFs) have been largely excluded from studies on food footprint. Here, we calculated the Emission Intensity profiles for seven seafood types generated by Mexican SSFs. Based on these results—which indicate that there exist several low‐carbon SSFs in Northwestern Mexico—we provide a coarse approximation for the total carbon footprint of Mexico’s motorized small‐scale fleet. Finally, we scrutinize the utility of non‐fuel data (such as GPS data) in predicting fuel consumption/carbon emissions across SSFs. To our knowledge, this is the first life‐cycle assessment to compare multiple seafood products generated by Mexican SSFs, and the first published link between tracking data and carbon accounting for SSFs specifically. We discuss how these results, in combination with insights gained from monitoring efforts in Northwestern Mexico, might be used to inform and incentivize “climate‐friendly” fisheries management. While carbon footprint represents just one component of sustainability, this article serves as a helpful case study for those preoccupied with carbon accounting and fishers sustainability in traditionally data‐limited scenarios.
ISSN:0363-2415
1548-8446
1548-8675
DOI:10.1002/fsh.10597