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Blue foods, sourced in aquatic environments, are important for the economies, livelihoods, nutritional security and cultures of people in many nations. They are often nutrient rich 1 , generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats 2 , and contribute to the health 3 , wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities 4 . The Blue Food Assessment recently evaluated nutritional, environmental, economic and justice dimensions of blue foods globally. Here we integrate these findings and translate them into four policy objectives to help realize the contributions that blue foods can make to national food systems around the world: ensuring supplies of critical nutrients, providing healthy alternatives to terrestrial meat, reducing dietary environmental footprints and safeguarding blue food contributions to nutrition, just economies and livelihoods under a changing climate. To account for how context-specific environmental, socio-economic and cultural aspects affect this contribution, we assess the relevance of each policy objective for individual countries, and examine associated co-benefits and trade-offs at national and international scales. We find that in many African and South American nations, facilitating consumption of culturally relevant blue food, especially among nutritionally vulnerable population segments, could address vitamin B 12 and omega-3 deficiencies. Meanwhile, in many global North nations, cardiovascular disease rates and large greenhouse gas footprints from ruminant meat intake could be lowered through moderate consumption of seafood with low environmental impact. The analytical framework we provide also identifies countries with high future risk, for whom climate adaptation of blue food systems will be particularly important. Overall the framework helps decision makers to assess the blue food policy objectives most relevant to their geographies, and to compare and contrast the benefits and trade-offs associated with pursuing these objectives., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

We are approaching a reckoning point in 2020 for global targets that better articulate the interconnections between biodiversity, ecosystem services and sustainable development. The Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD's) post-2020 global biodiversity framework and targets will be developed as we enter the last decade to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets. Despite recent findings of unprecedented declines in biodiversity and ecosystem services and their negative impacts on SDGs, these declines remain largely unaccounted for in the SDG's upcoming 'decade of action'. We use a social-ecological systems framework to develop four recommendations for targets that capture the interdependencies between biodiversity, ecosystem services and sustainable development. These recommendations, which are primarily aimed at the CBD post-2020 process, include moving from separate social and ecological targets to social-ecological targets that: account for (1) the support system role of biodiversity and (2) ecosystem services in sustainable development. We further propose target advances that (3) capture social-ecological feedbacks reinforcing unsustainable outcomes, and (4) reveal indirect feedbacks hidden by current target systems. By making these social-ecological interdependencies explicit, it is possible to create coherent systems of global targets that account for the complex role of biodiversity and ecosystem services in sustainable development.