Feasibility, co-benefits, and trade-offs of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies in blue food systems

Blue food—aquatic organisms fished or farmed in marine and freshwater areas, including fish, shellfish, and aquatic plants—make critical contributions to nutrition, livelihoods, and economies, and can have lower carbon footprints than other animal-source foods. While blue foods are increasingly discussed as part of climate change mitigation and adaptation, climate change also affects the feasibility, performance, and equity outcomes of blue food strategies, and evaluations of such strategies remain limited. Through an expert-driven, iterative process, we review 22 strategies through which blue foods may contribute to climate mitigation or adaptation, consolidating evidence on their potential effectiveness, feasibility, and associated trade-offs and synergies across sustainable development outcomes. The reviewed literature provides relatively good evidence for the mitigation potential of Decarbonizing production practices and Shift diets towards low-emission blue foods, and for adaptation benefits associated with Shift gear or target species. However, evidence across strategies remains uneven, highly context-specific, and in some cases limited. Trade-offs with sustainable development outcomes, risks of increasing vulnerability, and a persistent bias in research and policy towards technological innovation over systemic and societal change complicate evaluation and implementation of blue food climate strategies. No single strategy emerges as transformative in isolation. Rather, findings suggest that context-appropriate portfolios of strategies, implemented in combination, may offer complementary and synergistic benefits. Further research and evaluation are needed to substantiate claims about the transformative potential of blue foods, including systems-based analyses and targeted assessments of individual strategies, with particular attention paid to capacity-strengthening measures and equity in design and implementation.

Keywords: adaptation, blue food, climate change, Equity, mitigation, Sustainable development goals

Wong, A., M. Jonell, M. Tigchelaar, M. Troell, C. C. C. Wabnitz, E. H. Allison, K. Deering, P. J. G. Henriksson, K. M. Kleisner, J. Z. Koehn, J. G. Mason, M. S. Schutter, and E. R. Selig. 2026. Feasibility, co-benefits, and trade-offs of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies in blue food systems. Environmental Research: Food Systems 3:035007.