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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 rich1, generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats2, and contribute to the health3, wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities4. 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 B12 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.

Oceans play critical roles in the lives, economies, cultures, and nutrition of people globally, yet face increasing pressures from human activities that put those benefits at risk. To anticipate the future of the world's ocean, we review the many human activities that impose pressures on marine species and ecosystems, evaluating their impacts on marine life, the degree of scientific uncertainty in those assessments, and the expected trajectory over the next few decades. We highlight that fundamental research should prioritize areas of high potential impact and greater uncertainty about ecosystem vulnerability, such as emerging fisheries, organic chemical pollution, seabed mining, and the interactions of cumulative pressures, and deprioritize research on areas that demonstrate little impact or are well understood, such as plastic pollution and ship strikes to marine fauna. There remains hope for a productive and sustainable future ocean, but the window of opportunity for action is closing.

Aquatic foods from marine and freshwater systems are critical to the nutrition, health, livelihoods, economies and cultures of billions of people worldwide, but climate-related hazards may compromise their ability to provide these benefits. Here, we estimate national-level aquatic food system climate risk using an integrative food systems approach that connects climate hazards impacting marine and freshwater capture fisheries and aquaculture to their contributions to sustainable food system outcomes. We show that without mitigation, climate hazards pose high risks to nutritional, social, economic and environmental outcomes worldwide—especially for wild-capture fisheries in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Small Island Developing States. For countries projected to experience compound climate risks, reducing societal vulnerabilities can lower climate risk by margins similar to meeting Paris Agreement mitigation targets. System-level interventions addressing dimensions such as governance, gender equity and poverty are needed to enhance aquatic and terrestrial food system resilience and provide investments with large co-benefits towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. The nutritional, economic and livelihood contributions provided by aquatic food systems are threatened by climate change. Building climate resilience requires systemic interventions that reduce social vulnerabilities.

Marine species are declining at an unprecedented rate, catalyzing many nations to adopt conservation and management targets within their jurisdictions. However, marine species and the biophysical processes that sustain them are naive to international borders. An understanding of the prevalence of cross-border species distributions is important for informing high-level conservation strategies, such as bilateral or regional agreements. Here, we examined 28,252 distribution maps to determine the number and locations of transboundary marine plants and animals. More than 90% of species have ranges spanning at least two jurisdictions, with 58% covering more than 10 jurisdictions. All jurisdictions have at least one transboundary species, with the highest concentrations of transboundary species in the USA, Australia, Indonesia, and the Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction. Distributions of mapped biodiversity indicate that overcoming the challenges of multinational governance is critical for a much wider suite of species than migratory megavertebrates and commercially exploited fish stocks-the groups that have received the vast majority of multinational management attention. To effectively protect marine biodiversity, international governance mechanisms (particularly those related to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on Migratory Species, and Regional Seas Organizations) must be expanded to promote multinational conservation planning, and complimented by a holistic governance framework for biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction.

As marine spatial planning (MSP) continues to gain global prominence as an approach to ocean governance, planners and other stakeholders are eager to evaluate its social and ecological outcomes and to better understand whether plans are achieving their intended results in an equitable and cost-efficient manner. While a plan’s outcomes for marine environments and coastal communities may be of particular interest, these results cannot be separated from planning processes. The field has yet to fully develop the guidance necessary for this critical consideration of how features of an MSP process and external factors interact with plan performance and outcomes. To fill this gap we used a literature review and expert discussions to identify 19 enabling or disabling conditions of MSP within four major categories: Plan Attributes, Legal Context, Plan Development and Social Context, and Integration. We propose semi-quantitative scoring and the development of narratives to operationalize the framework as part of a comprehensive methodology for MSP outcome evaluation. Applying the framework can add depth to quantitative MSP evaluation, shed light on questions of outcome attribution, and inform plan adaptation. Evaluating MSP outcomes in the explicit context of the enabling or disabling conditions identified here can stimulate discussion around what works in MSP and provide a path forward for assessing the benefits and costs of MSP worldwide. By identifying conditions instrumental to effective MSP, and alternatively, conditions hindering a plan, the framework can be used to guide plan adaptation and promote learning across the wider MSP community.

People in the Northeast United States have a long history of benefitting from the ocean in many ways, exemplified by the region's important cod and lobster fisheries, coastal tourism and recent expansion of offshore energy. Over the past few decades, the region has become one of the fastest warming spots on the planet, has seen significant growth in coastal populations, and expansion of new sectors into the marine environment, resulting in ecosystem shifts and changes to the supply and distribution of these benefits. With these changes comes a need for measuring ocean health to understand how engagement with the ocean may be affected, and how regional management may need to adapt. To address this need, we tailored the Ocean Health Index framework to the U.S. Northeast region, scoring eight distinct goals for ocean health on a scale of 0 to 100 for 11 sub‐regions over 13 years (2005–2017). All goal scores were averaged resulting in an Ocean Health Index score of 83 for the Northeast in 2017. This score fluctuated by 1 point in either direction (82–84) in the previous 12 years. The lowest scoring goals in 2017 also exhibited the highest volatility since 2005, Food Provision (64) and Resource Access Opportunities (71). The region's highest goal scores came from Livelihoods & Economies (99) and Biodiversity (90) and remained stable during the study period. Clean Waters scores had a steady, significant downward trend since 2005, while Resource Access Opportunities and Aquaculture show the largest improvements. This synthesis of over 50 datasets to create annual aggregate scores provides the public, government and non‐government agencies with an easily digestible summary of how the region is faring in regards to ocean health. Perhaps even more importantly, this synthesis allows for the tracking of trends over time and the ability to quickly identify and prioritize low‐scoring components of ocean health that could benefit from dedicated resources for improvement. As managers plan for the future in a changing Northeast marine region, the ability to track annual changes in ocean health and its respective components is key to making decisions that benefit the entire social‐ecological system. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

A major challenge in sustainability science is identifying targets that maximize ecosystem benefits to humanity while minimizing the risk of crossing critical system thresholds. One critical threshold is the biomass at which populations become so depleted that their population growth rates become negative—depensation. Here, we evaluate how the value of monitoring information increases as a natural resource spends more time near the critical threshold. This benefit emerges because higher monitoring precision promotes higher yield and a greater capacity to recover from overharvest. We show that precautionary buffers that trigger increased monitoring precision as resource levels decline may offer a way to minimize monitoring costs and maximize profits. In a world of finite resources, improving our understanding of the trade-off between precision in estimates of population status and the costs of mismanagement will benefit stakeholders that shoulder the burden of these economic and social costs.

The ocean contains unique biodiversity, provides valuable food resources and is a major sink for anthropogenic carbon. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an effective tool for restoring ocean biodiversity and ecosystem services1,2, but at present only 2.7% of the ocean is highly protected3. This low level of ocean protection is due largely to conflicts with fisheries and other extractive uses. To address this issue, here we developed a conservation planning framework to prioritize highly protected MPAs in places that would result in multiple benefits today and in the future. We find that a substantial increase in ocean protection could have triple benefits, by protecting biodiversity, boosting the yield of fisheries and securing marine carbon stocks that are at risk from human activities. Our results show that most coastal nations contain priority areas that can contribute substantially to achieving these three objectives of biodiversity protection, food provision and carbon storage. A globally coordinated effort could be nearly twice as efficient as uncoordinated, national-level conservation planning. Our flexible prioritization framework could help to inform both national marine spatial plans4 and global targets for marine conservation, food security and climate action. Using a globally coordinated strategic conservation framework to plan an increase in ocean protection through marine protected areas can yield benefits for biodiversity, food provisioning and carbon storage.

Aquaculture policy often promotes production of low-trophic level species for sustainable industry growth. Yet, the application of the trophic level concept to aquaculture is complex, and its value for assessing sustainability is further complicated by continual reformulation of feeds. The majority of fed farmed fish and invertebrate species are produced using human-made compound feeds that can differ markedly from the diet of the same species in the wild and continue to change in composition. Using data on aquaculture feeds, we show that technical advances have substantially decreased the mean effective trophic level of farmed species, such as salmon (mean TL = 3.48 to 2.42) and tilapia (2.32 to 2.06), from 1995 to 2015. As farmed species diverge in effective trophic level from their wild counterparts, they are coalescing at a similar effective trophic level due to standardisation of feeds. This pattern blurs the interpretation of trophic level in aquaculture because it can no longer be viewed as a trait of the farmed species, but rather is a dynamic feature of the production system. Guidance based on wild trophic position or historical resource use is therefore misleading. Effective aquaculture policy needs to avoid overly simplistic sustainability indicators such as trophic level. Instead, employing empirically derived metrics based on the specific farmed properties of species groups, management techniques and advances in feed formulation will be crucial for achieving truly sustainable options for farmed seafood.

Small-scale fisheries and aquaculture (SSFA) provide livelihoods for over 100 million people and sustenance for ~1 billion people, particularly in the Global South. Aquatic foods are distributed through diverse supply chains, with the potential to be highly adaptable to stresses and shocks, but face a growing range of threats and adaptive challenges. Contemporary governance assumes homogeneity in SSFA despite the diverse nature of this sector. Here we use SSFA actor profiles to capture the key dimensions and dynamism of SSFA diversity, reviewing contemporary threats and exploring opportunities for the SSFA sector. The heuristic framework can inform adaptive governance actions supporting the diversity and vital roles of SSFA in food systems, and in the health and livelihoods of nutritionally vulnerable people—supporting their viability through appropriate policies whilst fostering equitable and sustainable food systems.

Biodiversity, as we see it today, ultimately is the outcome of millions of years of evolution; however, biodiversity in its multiple dimensions is changing rapidly due to increasing human domination of Earth. Here, we present the “phylogenetic completeness” (PC) a concept and methodology that intends to safeguard Earth’s evolutionary heritage by maintaining all branches of the tree of life. We performed a global evaluation of the PC approach using data from five major terrestrial clades and compared the results to an approach in which species are conserved or lost randomly. We demonstrate that under PC, for a given number of species extinctions, it is possible to maximize the protection of evolutionary innovations in every clade. The PC approach is flexible and can be used to conduct a phylogenetic audit of biodiversity under different conservation scenarios. The PC approach complements existing conservation efforts and is linked to the post-2020 Convention of Biodiversity targets.

A growing body of literature has documented myriad effects of human activities on animal behaviour, yet the ultimate ecological consequences of these behavioural shifts remain largely uninvestigated. While it is understood that, in the absence of humans, variation in animal behaviour can have cascading effects on species interactions, community structure and ecosystem function, we know little about whether the type or magnitude of human-induced behavioural shifts translate into detectable ecological change. Here we synthesise empirical literature and theory to create a novel framework for examining the range of behaviourally mediated pathways through which human activities may affect different ecosystem functions. We highlight the few empirical studies that show the potential realisation of some of these pathways, but also identify numerous factors that can dampen or prevent ultimate ecosystem consequences. Without a deeper understanding of these pathways, we risk wasting valuable resources on mitigating behavioural effects with little ecological relevance, or conversely mismanaging situations in which behavioural effects do drive ecosystem change. The framework presented here can be used to anticipate the nature and likelihood of ecological outcomes and prioritise management among widespread human-induced behavioural shifts, while also suggesting key priorities for future research linking humans, animal behaviour and ecology.

Global demand for freshwater and marine foods (i.e., seafood) is rising and an increasing proportion is farmed. Aquaculture encompasses a range of species and cultivation methods, resulting in dive...

Feeding a growing, increasingly affluent population while limiting environmental pressures of food production is a central challenge for society. Understanding the location and magnitude of food production is key to addressing this challenge because pressures vary substantially across food production types. Applying data and models from life cycle assessment with the methodologies for mapping cumulative environmental impacts of human activities (hereafter cumulative impact mapping) provides a powerful approach to spatially map the cumulative environmental pressure of food production in a way that is consistent and comprehensive across food types. However, these methodologies have yet to be combined. By synthesizing life cycle assessment and cumulative impact mapping methodologies, we provide guidance for comprehensively and cumulatively mapping the environmental pressures (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, spatial occupancy, and freshwater use) associated with food production systems. This spatial approach enables quantification of current and potential future environmental pressures, which is needed for decision makers to create more sustainable food policies and practices. ª 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

With the global supply of forage fish at a plateau, fed aquaculture must continue to reduce dependence on fishmeal and oil in feeds to ensure sustainable sector growth. The use of novel aquaculture feed ingredients is growing, but their contributions to scalable and sustainable aquafeed solutions are unclear. Here, we show that global adoption of novel aquafeeds could substantially reduce aquaculture’s forage fish demand by 2030, maintaining feed efficiencies and omega-3 fatty acid profiles. We combine production data, scenario modelling and a decade of experimental data on forage fish replacement using microalgae, macroalgae, bacteria, yeast and insects to illustrate how reducing future fish oil demand, particularly in high-value species such as salmonids, will be key for the sustainability of fed aquaculture. However, considerable uncertainties remain surrounding novel feed efficacy across different life-cycle stages and taxa, and various social, environmental, economic and regulatory challenges will dictate their widespread use. Yet, we demonstrate how even limited adoption of novel feeds could aid sustainable aquaculture growth, which will become increasingly important for food security.

As the human population grows and climate change threatens the stability of seafood sources, we face the key question of how we will meet increasing demand, and do so sustainably. Many of the 20 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) member nations have been global leaders in the protection and management of wild fisheries, but to date, most of these nations have not developed robust aquaculture industries. Using existing data and documentation of aquaculture targets from government and industry, we compiled and analysed past trends in farmed and wild seafood production and consumption in ICES nations, as well as the potential and need to increase aquaculture production by 2050. We found that the majority of ICES nations lacks long-term strategies for aquaculture growth, with an increasing gap between future domestic production and consumption—resulting in a potential 7 million tonne domestic seafood deficit by 2050, which would be supplemented by imports from other countries (e.g. China). We also found recognition of climate change as a concern for aquaculture growth, but little on what that means for meeting production goals. Our findings highlight the need to prioritize aquaculture policy to set more ambitious domestic production goals and/or improve sustainable sourcing of seafood from other parts of the world, with explicit recognition and strategic planning for climate change affecting such decisions. In short, there is a need for greater concerted effort by ICES member nations to address aquaculture’s long-term future prospects.

Despite substantial biodiversity conservation efforts over the past two decades, Earth's biodiversity is rapidly declining. We identify global priorities for the expansion of marine conservation efforts, aiming to conserve at least 10% of the range of all 22,885 mapped marine species. We found that a minimum of 8.5 million km2 (2.5% of the ocean) of new conservation areas are required, and show that, in total, at least 26% of the ocean needs effective conservation to preserve marine biodiversity. For each priority area, we recommend broad conservation responses—ranging from marine protected areas to large-scale policy approaches (e.g., fisheries regulations)—best suited to mitigate threats to biodiversity in that area. With a post-2020 global biodiversity agreement currently under development, our analysis provides insights into the scale of conservation action required across the marine realm and identifies new areas that clearly warrant conservation attention.

With oceans under increasing pressure from human activities, sustainable development and conservation efforts are working to set meaningful targets for healthy oceans. Determining whether those targets are achieved requires indicators that measure status and progress. Here, I reflect upon lessons learned from a decade of developing and calculating the Ocean Health Index.

Blue foods play a central role in food and nutrition security for billions of people and are a cornerstone of the livelihoods, economies, and cultures of many coastal and riparian communities. Blue foods are extraordinarily diverse, are often rich in essential micronutrients and fatty acids, and can often be produced in ways that are more environmentally sustainable than terrestrial animal-source foods. Capture fisheries constitute the largest wild-food resource for human extraction that would be challenging to replace. Yet, despite their unique value, blue foods have often been left out of food system analyses, policies, and investments. Here, we focus on three imperatives for realizing the potential of blue foods: (1) Bring blue foods into the heart of food system decision-making; (2) Protect and develop the potential of blue foods to help end malnutrition; and (3) Support the central role of small-scale actors in fisheries and aquaculture. Recognition of the importance of blue foods for food and nutrition security constitutes a critical justification to preserve the integrity and diversity of aquatic species and ecosystems.

Management of the land-sea interface is essential for global conservation and sustainability objectives because coastal regions maintain natural processes that support biodiversity and the livelihood of billions of people. However, assessments of coastal regions have focused strictly on either the terrestrial or marine realm. Consequently, understanding of the overall state of Earth's coastal regions is poor. We integrated the terrestrial human footprint and marine cumulative human impact maps in a global assessment of the anthropogenic pressures affecting coastal regions. Of coastal regions globally, 15.5% had low anthropogenic pressure, mostly in Canada, Russia, and Greenland. Conversely, 47.9% of coastal regions were heavily affected by humanity, and in most countries (84.1%)50% of their coastal regions were degraded. Nearly half (43.3%) of protected areas across coastal regions were exposed to high human pressures. To meet global sustainability objectives, all nations must undertake greater actions to preserve and restore the coastal regions within their borders.costa, huella humana, impacto humano cumulativo, litoral, presión humana, restauración, tierras vírgenes Resumen El manejo de la interfaz entre la tierra y el mar es esencial para los objetivos mundiales de conservación y sustentabilidad ya que las regiones costeras mantienen los procesos naturales que sostienen a la biodiversidad y al sustento de miles de millones de personas. Sin embargo, los análisis de las regiones costeras se han enfocado estrictamente en el ámbito marino o en el terrestre, pero no en ambos. Por consiguiente, el conocimiento del estado general de las regiones costeras del planeta es muy pobre. Integramos la huella terrestre humana y mapas marinos del impacto humano cumulativo en un análisis global de las presiones antropogénicas que afectan las áreas costeras. De las áreas costeras de todo el mundo, el 15.5% tuvieron una presión antropogénica reducida, principalmente en Canadá, Rusia y Groenlandia. En cambio, el 47.9% de las regiones costeras estuvieron fuertemente afectas por la humanidad, y en la mayoría de los países (84.1%)50% de sus regiones litorales se encuentran degradadas. Casi la mitad (43.3%) de las áreas protegidas en las regiones costeras tienen un grado de exposición a fuertes presiones humanas. Para cumplir los objetivos mundiales de sustentabilidad, todos los países deben emprender mejores acciones para preservar y restaurar las regiones litorales dentro de sus fronteras.

Determining where environmental management is best applied, either through regulating single sectors of human activities or across sectors, is complicated by interactions between human impacts and the environment. In this article, we show how an explicit representation of human-environment interactions can help, via “impact networks” including activities (e.g. shipping), stressors (e.g. ship strikes), species (e.g. humpback whales) or ecosystem services (e.g. marine recreation). Impact networks can enable the identification of “leverage nodes”, which, if present, can direct managers to the activities and stressors crucial for reducing risk to important ecosystem components. Exploring an impact network for a coastal ecosystem in British Columbia, Canada, we seek to identify these leverage nodes using a new approach employing Bayesian Belief Networks of risks to ecosystems. In so doing, we address three key questions: (1) Do leverage nodes exist? (2) Do management plans for species correctly identify leverage nodes? (3) Does the management of leverage nodes for certain species realize benefits for other species and ecosystem services? We show that there are several leverage nodes across all species investigated, and show that preconceptions about the regulation of risk to species can misidentify leverage nodes, potentially leading to ineffective management. Notably, we show that managing fisheries does not reduce overall risk to herring whereas managing diverse cumulative impacts including nutrient runoff, oil spills, and marine debris can reduce risk to herring, additional species, and related ecosystem services. Thus, by targeting leverage nodes, managers can efficiently mitigate risks for whole communities, ecosystems, and ecosystem services.

International audience

Establishing systems of protected areas (PAs) and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) is a key strategy to reversing biodiversity loss (CBD SBSTA, 2021; Maxwell et al., 2020). As part of its mandate to safeguard biodiversity, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) provided clear international targets on establishing PAs and OECMs in 2010. Aichi Target 11 called for the protection of 10% of marine and 17% of terrestrial areas globally (CBD, 2010). These percentages were interim targets to encourage ambition while ensuring tractability and not necessarily based on conservation needs (Woodley et al. 2019). There is general consensus that the percentages behind Target 11 were insufficient to protect all important aspects of Earth's biodiversity. Proposed replacement percentages range from 28% to 80%, depending on the desired outcome (Butchart et al., 2015, Dinerstein et al. 2019, Woodley et al. 2019, Jones et al., 2020). As the CBD finalizes its post-2020 strategic plan - the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) - there is consensus that it must include more ambitious area-based targets paired with stronger implementation mechanisms (Visconti et al., 2019; Maxwell et al., 2020). Most lessons learned from the outcomes of Aichi Target 11 relate to the suitability of its environmental targets, potentially obscuring how it affected social equity (the absence of avoidable and unfair cost and benefit distributions) (McDermott et al., 2013). The power to implement CBD targets lies with countries through their national biodiversity strategic and action plans (NBSAPs). Whether targets are achieved equitably depends on decision-makers within national borders. However, global conservation is inherently a transboundary pursuit; costs of environmental degradation and benefits of conservation spill over borders (Mason et al., 2020; Roberson et al., 2020). Geopolitical states have high variability in the numbers of threatened species and habitats within their borders and varied abilities to conserve based on financial capacities, conflict, and collective attitudes toward conservation. These realities require consideration of equity beyond the local scale to equity among geopolitical states in global conservation efforts (Sarkki & Garcia, 2019). To date, the CBD has emphasized equitable benefit sharing, or the fair distribution of benefits from the harvest or study of biological resources (Nagoya Protocol). There has been less emphasis on equitable cost-sharing, which includes direct costs of establishing and managing PAs and opportunity costs of not undertaking certain economic activities (e.g., agriculture) in PAs (Naidoo & Iwamura, 2007). Costs pose significant short-term barriers to halting biodiversity loss (Waldron et al., 2013; Maxwell et al., 2020). Once adequate financing and equitable cost-sharing are achieved, long-term revenues and ecosystem services of most PAs are projected to exceed implementation and opportunity costs (Waldron et al., 2020). However, interventions are still needed to alleviate the short-term costs certain groups may bear. Although the CBD does not legally require that countries implement equitable cost-sharing, finalization of the GBF presents an opportunity to apply social equity concepts to its revised area-based conservation strategy for just and effective implementation. We highlighted this opportunity by identifying lessons learned from Aichi Target 11 through the lens of social equity theory. We then devised recommendations on how to approach equitable cost-sharing among countries for PAs in the post-2020 GBF.